Does anyone remember the math wars?

The New York Times is out with yet another entry on the failure of traditional teachers to teach math to Americans:

My hunch is that how we learn math in America has very little to do with best practices and a lot to do with how teachers remember learning math when they were children.

Can you spell Weltanschauung?

Free advice: Never trust a "hunch" when your hunch is identical in every respect with the worldview of a Most Emailed story in the New York Times.

If your hunch is identical in every respect with the worldview of a Most Emailed story in the New York Times, it's not a hunch. It's conventional wisdom and nobody needs to hear it again.

Contra Elizabeth Green, we do not have to accept that the traditional approach we take to teaching math — the one that can be mind-numbing, but also comfortingly familiar — does not work. It should be obvious to anyone who actually looked at our history that "the traditional approach to teaching math" worked perfectly well for many American students.

Here's Barry Garelick:

From the 1940′s to the mid 1960′s, at a time when math and other subjects were taught in the traditional manner, scores in all subjects on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills increased steadily. From 1965 to the mid-70′s there was a dramatic decline, and then scores increased again until 1990 when they reached an all-time high. Scores stayed relatively stable in the 90′s.

TRADITIONAL MATH MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY (BARRY GARELICK)

The decline in SAT scores doesn't fit the narrative, either.

Do we know when state legislatures passed laws requiring teachers to have degrees in education?

I'm trying to track that down.

Speaking of the math wars, it's been a couple of decades now since the NCTM, an organization whose membership consists almost entirely of public school math teachers, accepted that the traditional approach we take to teaching math does not work.

Chris is turning 20. Neither he nor any of his peers learned their math facts at school.

Massachusetts School Law of 1789

From Terrence Moore's The Story-Killers:

Whereas the Constitution of this Commonwealth hath declared it to be the duty of the General Court, to provide for the education of youth: and whereas a general dissemination of knowledge and virtue is necessary to the prosperity of every State, and the very existence of a Commonwealth:

     Section 1. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives, in General Court assembled . . . That every town or district within this Commonwealth . . . shall be provided with a School-Master or School-Masters, of good morals, to teach children to read and write, and to instruct them in the English language, as well as in arithmetic, orthography, and decent behavior . . . And every town or district containing two hundred families, or householders, shall be provided with a grammar School-Master, of good morals, well instructed in the Latin, Greek, and English languages . . .

     Section 4. Be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That it shall be and it is hereby made the duty of the President, Professors and Tutors of the University at Cambridge [Harvard], Preceptors and Teachers of Academies, and all other instructors of youth, to take diligent care, and to exert their best endeavors, to impress on the minds of children and youth, committed to their career and instruction, the principles of piety, justice, and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity, and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry and frugality, chastity, moderation and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society, and the basis upon which the Republican Constitution is structured. And it shall be the duty of such instructors, to endeavor to lead those under their care (as their ages and capacities will admit) into a particular understanding of the tendency of the before mentioned virtues, to preserve and perfect a Republican Constitution, and to secure the blessings of liberty, as well as to promote their future happiness; and the tendency of the opposite vices to slavery and ruin.

Virtues are the ornament of human society and the basis upon which the Republican Constitution is structured.

1974 parody of college freshman writing

I'm on the home stretch! Four more chapters of Debbie's wonderful book, and we're there.

In the meantime, here's a 1974 parody of college freshman writing that contains not a single grammatical error, dangling modifier, comma splice, or sentence beginning with some variant of "In the report it stated." Apparently bad freshman writing in 1974 was quite a bit less bad than bad student writing in 2013.

For the record, I think it's rude to call student writing "intellectually vacuous trash."

[I wrote this parody of a freshman theme to preservemy sanity while struggling to read a batch of themes during one Christmas holiday. The lesson here may be that if we continue assigning themes on such impossible topics as friendship, love, or wisdom, we deserve to get the intellectually vacuous trash that students write for us.]

FRIENDSHIP
WALTER S. MINOT

Statement of Intent: My purpose in this theme is to define very specifically the real meaning of true friendship.

In today's modern world, true friendship is very rare and hard to accomplish. Webster defines friendship as the state or fact of being friends. Thus it can be easily seen that in order for friendship to have a state of existence there must be friends, because without friends there would be no friendship.

True friendship denotes more than just being friendly with someone. We are amicable with many people who are not really true friends. This is not true friendship. Truly real friendship happens only when two people are really true friends. In order to have a friend, you must be a friend first, or you won't have any friends. Everyone needs a friend, or his or her life will be very alienated.

A friend is a person who helps you up when you are down. You may have many but can have a few true friends. A friend is someone who acquaintances, you only  will continue being your friend even if you do something bad to him. He will adhere to you through thick and thin, through rain or shine. If you took your best friend's girl away from him, he would still be your friend.

On mutual respect is based true friendship. A good example of this is the friendship between Allen Whitehall and Robert Epstein. If Al needed a dime to buy flowers for his widowed mother who has arthritis and Bob had a dime, he would give it to him no matter what the cost of the personal sacrifice.

As I have shown, true friendshipis the greatest thing anyone can have. Without friends, no man can stand alone. I can only finalize my definition with these words:

True friendship is eternal and it should last a lifetime.

Gannon College Erie, Pa.

College Composition and Communication, Vol. 25, No. 2 (May, 1974), p. 154    

Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Justice Rehnquist cites Cardozo in his Dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree:

Metaphors in law are to be narrowly watched, for starting as devices to liberate thought, they end often by enslaving it.
- Benjamin Cardozo 1926

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace vs. Jaffree

from Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace vs. Jaffree

Some who trouble to read the opinions in these cases will find it ironic-perhaps even bizarre-that on the very day we heard arguments in the cases, the Court's session opened with an invocation for Divine protection. Across the park a few hundred yards away, the House of Representatives and the Senate regularly open each session with a prayer. These legislative prayers are not just one minute in duration, but are extended, thoughtful invocations and prayers for Divine guidance. They are given, as they have been since 1789, by clergy appointed as official chaplains and paid from the Treasury of the United States. Congress has also provided chapels in the Capitol, at public expense, where Members and others may pause for prayer, meditation--or a moment of silence.

[snip]

I make several points about today's curious holding.

(a) It makes no sense to say that Alabama has "endorsed prayer" by merely enacting a new statute "to specify expressly that voluntary prayer is one of the authorized activities during a moment of silence," ante, at 77 (O'CONNOR, J., concurring in judgment) (emphasis added). To suggest that a moment-of-silence statute that includes the word "prayer" unconstitutionally endorses religion, while one that simply provides for a moment of silence does not, manifests not neutrality but hostility toward religion. For decades our opinions have stated that hostility toward any religion or toward all religions is as much forbidden by the Constitution as is an official establishment of religion. The Alabama Legislature has no more "endorsed" religion than a state or the Congress does when it provides for legislative chaplains, or than this Court does when it opens each session with an invocation to God. Today's decision recalls the observations of Justice Goldberg:

"[U]ntutored devotion to the concept of neutrality can lead to invocation or approval of results which partake not simply of that noninterference and noninvolvement with the religious which the Constitution commands, but of a brooding and pervasive dedication to the secular and a passive, or even active, hostility to the religious. Such results are not only not compelled by the Constitution, but, it seems to me, are prohibited by it." Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203, 306 (1963) (concurring opinion).

[snip]

(c) The Court's extended treatment of the "test" of Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971), suggests a naive preoccupation with an easy, bright-line approach for addressing constitutional issues. We have repeatedly cautioned that Lemon did not establish a rigid caliper capable of resolving every Establishment Clause issue, but that it sought only to provide "signposts." "In each [Establishment Clause] case, the inquiry calls for line-drawing; no fixed, per se rule can be framed." Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U. S. 668, 678 (1984)....In any event, our responsibility is not to apply tidy formulas by rote; our duty is to determine whether the statute or practice at issue is a step toward establishing a state religion.

Given today's decision, however, perhaps it is understandable that the opinions in support of the judgment all but ignore the Establishment Clause itself and the concerns that underlie it.

(d) The notion that the Alabama statute is a step toward creating an established church borders on, if it does not trespass into, the ridiculous. The statute does not remotely threaten religious liberty; it affirmatively furthers the values of religious freedom and tolerance that the Establishment Clause was designed to protect. Without pressuring those who do not wish to pray, the statute simply creates an opportunity to think, to plan, or to pray if one wishes--as Congress does by providing chaplains and chapels.

[snip]

If the government may not accommodate religious needs when it does so in a wholly neutral and noncoercive manner, the "benevolent neutrality" that we have long considered the correct constitutional standard will quickly translate into the "callous indifference" that the Court has consistently held the Establishment Clause does not require. The Court today has ignored the wise admonition of Justice Goldberg that "the measure of constitutional adjudication is the ability and willingness to distinguish between real threat and mere shadow." Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U. S., at 308 (concurring opinion). The innocuous statute that the Court strikes down does not even rise to the level of "mere shadow." JUSTICE O'CONNOR paradoxically acknowledges: "It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren." Ante, at 73. 5 I would add to that, "even if they choose to pray."

The mountains have labored and brought forth a mouse.

and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution

My first post on Wallace vs. Jaffree did not make clear that Justice Rehnquist supported Alabama's statute § 16-1-20.1, which authorized "a 1-minute period of silence in all public schools 'for meditation or voluntary prayer.'"

An Appeals Court found 16-1-20.1 unconstitutional; the Supreme Court upheld.

Justices Rehnquist, White, and Burger dissented. They argue that prayer in public schools is constitutional.

Here is Rehnquist:

The Framers intended the Establishment Clause to prohibit the designation of any church as a "national" one. The Clause was also designed to stop the Federal Government from asserting a preference for one religious denomination or sect over others. Given the "incorporation" of the Establishment Clause as against the States via the Fourteenth Amendment in Everson [1947], States are prohibited as well from establishing a religion or discriminating between sects. As its history abundantly shows, however, nothing in the Establishment Clause requires government to be strictly neutral between religion and irreligion, nor does that Clause prohibit Congress or the States from pursuing legitimate secular ends through nondiscriminatory sectarian means.

The Court strikes down the Alabama statute because the State wished to "characterize prayer as a favored practice." Ante, at 60. It would come as much of a shock to those who drafted the Bill of Rights as it will to a large number of thoughtful Americans today to learn that the Constitution, as construed by the majority, prohibits the Alabama Legislature from "endorsing" prayer. George Washington himself, at the request of the very Congress which passed the Bill of Rights, proclaimed a day of "public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God." History must judge whether it was the Father of his Country in 1789, or a majority of the Court today, which has strayed from the meaning of the Establishment Clause.

The State surely has a secular interest in regulating the manner in which public schools are conducted. Nothing in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, properly understood, prohibits any such generalized "endorsement" of prayer. I would therefore reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

I'll post excerpts from Justice Burger's dissent as well.


and see:
the Establishment Clause
Free Exercise Clause
Wallace vs Jaffree
the Lemon test
Lemon v. Kurzman 
Lemon test

Justice Rehnquist lists "unprincipled" and "inconsistent" decisions
Justice Rehnquist on school prayer and the Constitution
Jefferson's "wall of separation"
Justice Burger's dissent in Wallace v. Jaffree
Benjamin Cardozo on metaphors in law

Mumford High, RIP

A beautiful piece from Barry on The Destruction of Education and the Preservation of Inequity:

From the fall of 1964 through June 1967, I attended Mumford High School in Detroit.... My brother and sister also attended Mumford and graduated in 1962 and 1958. As I write this, Mumford is in the process of being demolished. The demolition is part of the $500 million Detroit Public Schools Capital Improvement Program started in 2009. Because of a shrinking student population, the state is in the process of shutting down almost half the schools in Detroit. The school district is attempting to sell the shut down schools for redevelopment, an effort that has earned over $10 million since 2009.

But although Mumford is being destroyed, a new version of the high school has been built on what had been the original Mumford’s athletic field. The new school cost $52 million to build, secured by a bond issue in a city where almost half of its schools have been shut down. From the web page for the new Mumford, it is described as a “LEED Silver Certified state-of-the-art facility and will offer academic core areas, a high-tech media center, modern science laboratories, a courtyard student quad, and a community health clinic.” Mumford is one of 15 schools that has been taken out of the Detroit Public School system and assigned to Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority–a statewide district set up for managing struggling schools. The new Mumford will open in the fall.

For those of us who grew up in a city that was at one time vibrant and had one of the best school systems in the country, it has been difficult to watch its decay.

[snip]

It is fairly easy to dismiss the decline of education in Detroit on its failing economy and its accompanying social ills and even for some to make sweeping accusations about the low cognitive ability of Detroit’s student population. But the decline of education is not limited to Detroit. It has been happening across the U.S. for quite some time, although not as catastrophically as in Detroit. The vision of education in this country for many decades has been education and equity for all. In fact, the history of the equity problems and their solutions in the U.S. has its parallels in the history of education in Detroit. It is a story of how the fight to eliminate inequity in education has actually increased it.

[snip]

During the period of the 50’s and early 60’s, Mumford had been one of the premier high schools in Detroit, competing with Cass Tech—a magnet school in the downtown area that had admission requirements—for the academic achievements of its students. Mumford was located in northwest Detroit which was a mix of working class, middle and upper middle class neighborhoods. Though predominantly Jewish, the northwest section was also home to upper middle class African Americans who attended Mumford (Graham; 1999).

[snip]

Mirel (1993) (an education professor at University of Michigan who has done much research in the history of the Detroit Public School system) points out that during the depression of the 30’s in Detroit as in the U.S as a whole, the push in education was to keep graduation rates steady and prevent drop outs. With the deficit of work, the thinking was that it was better to have young people in school than out with nothing to do. The general curriculum in Detroit at that time was experiencing a large number of failure rates. To keep the students off the streets, courses were made easier. “Descriptive” science courses were introduced in lieu of lab-based courses and focused on useful topics such as how vacuum cleaners worked. “Relevance” was the watchword just as “engagement” is now. Topics such as traffic safety were woven into classes such as civics, and schools offered courses in personal standards, focusing on topics such as diet, dress, etiquette and personal hygiene. Girls were offered courses on “Appearing to Advantage, “Homemaking”, “Use of Leisure Time” and “Bride and Trousseau”.

This pattern continued long past the depression, past World War II and into the 50’s and 60’s, during which time the influx of African Americans from the south into Detroit continued because of the well-paying factory jobs. Curricula in high schools had evolved into four different types: college-preparatory, vocational (e.g., plumbing, metal work, electrical, auto), trade-oriented (e.g., accounting, secretarial), and general.

[snip]

During the period of the 50’s and early 60’s, Mumford had been one of the premier high schools in Detroit, competing with Cass Tech—a magnet school in the downtown area that had admission requirements—for the academic achievements of its students. Mumford was located in northwest Detroit which was a mix of working class, middle and upper middle class neighborhoods. Though predominantly Jewish, the northwest section was also home to upper middle class African Americans who attended Mumford (Graham; 1999).

[snip]

Northwest Detroit started to experience the phenomenon of white flight starting in the late fifties. The flight began in the twenties, starting in a more central area of Detroit—an area that would be the site of the riots to occur in the summer of 1967—that had also been predominantly Jewish in the 20’s through the 40’s. The flight’s trajectory continued and by the 60’s included northwest Detroit where I was living, and would continue to the suburbs. The demographic of Mumford was changing as well. According to Mirel (1993), 22 percent of black students were in the general track by 1967 with whites making up only 2 percent of the general track despite it being one of the most academically oriented high schools in the city.

After graduation, most boys who were in the general and vocation tracks in Detroit were drafted and sent to Viet Nam. Boys in the college prep track who went on to college, on the other hand, were given a draft deferment status which students in the general and vocational tracks did not receive. The role of the draft policies at the time of Viet Nam played no small part in contributing to the recognition of inequity between white and blacks.

[snip]

The summer of 1967 brought the riots that ultimately escalated the white flight to the suburbs, and brought in its wake racial rifts from which some say Detroit has never recovered. In the years shortly following the riots, there were efforts to decentralize and desegregate schools—met with protest from the white communities that would be affected. A friend of mine attended Cooley High School (located a few miles away from Mumford). In 1968 he witnessed a race riot that occurred at the school in April of that year, shortly after Martin Luther King was assassinated. He described it as follows:

“It really was a travesty, particularly in that the kids fighting were the ones in tech programs, being streamed into Viet Nam. Cooley was half black, half white and a powder keg as long as I was there. I went back to visit a year after I graduated — the white exodus occurred and Cooley had become almost entirely black. Achievement was up, violence was down — it had transformed into a 50!s middle class school.”

My friend’s description is apt in a way that he may not have realized when he wrote it. To his eyes, achievement looked like it was on the rise as it did in many schools. Change had in fact come to Northern to address the protest of a few years back and it came to Cooley, Mumford and other predominantly black schools in Detroit. But the change came in the form of more “relevance”, focusing on black history, black culture, the arts, dance, and creative writing.

[snip]

The reforms in the Detroit schools were consistent with reforms brought about across the U.S. during the 60’s and 70’s, by the prevalent radical critics of schools at that time.... “Traditional” schooling was seen as an instrument of oppression and schools were recast in a new, “hipper” interpretation of what educational progressivism was supposed to be about. In moving away from the way things were, the education establishment’s goal was to restore equity to students rather than maintaining the tracking that created dividing lines between social class and race. The end product however was a merging of general track with college prep with the result that college prep was becoming student-centered and needs-based with lower standards, and less homework assigned. Classes such as Film Making and Cooking for Singles were offered, and requirements for English and History courses were reduced if not dropped. Social class and race were no longer a barrier for such classes as evidenced by the increasing numbers of white students who began taking them. With the requirements for graduation being diminished in the “general” track as a result of the student-centered fad, this track saw an increase in students from 12 percent in the late 60’s to 42 percent by the late 70’s. (Ravitch, 2003).

[snip]

Currently, high schools have an honors/AP track, and a general track. The general track consists of less rigorous courses and represents a lower level of education. Qualification for the honors/AP track starts before high school, and in elementary and middle schools, there is also a two-tier system. The higher tier (starting at about third grade) is the gifted and talented track. In general, this track provides teacher-directed traditional instruction at or above grade level. For students who do not qualify (and the criteria for qualifying vary, with differing definitions of what constitutes “giftedness”), they are placed in classes with students of varying abilities. As such, they are subjected to a one-size-fits-all curriculum that involves student-centered group activities, and project-oriented approaches to learning. This educational approach is guided by an undying faith led by the educational establishment that all we need to do is teach students how to learn, how to think critically and that facts and content are things they can look up (on Google) on a “just in time” basis whenever they really need to know. For many students, the approach is a guarantee that they will not be able to handle honors or AP courses in high school.

The elimination of inequity and tracking, therefore, has evolved to a two track system starting in lower grades and continuing on in high school. Those students not considered “smart enough for the gifted programs” are consigned to the lower track.

[snip]

In the meantime, there is a push for more technology in the schools, as if SmartBoards in every classroom and an iPad for every student is the answer. The tearing down of Mumford and the building of a state-of-the-art high school are indicative of what education has now become.

The complete article here.

Horace Mann on letters and spelling

I came across the original source of Horace Mann's characterization of letters (and words!) as "skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions":

A LECTURE ON THE BEST MODE OF PREPARING AND USING SPELLING-BOOKS
Delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, August, 1841
by Horace Mann, Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education
Common School Journal, Volumes 3-4 | p. 9-16; 25-32

My subject is Spelling-Books, and the manner in which they should be prepared and used for teaching the Alphabet, Orthography, and Pronunciation of the English language. I ought to say, of the English languages, for we have two English languages; one according to which we write, another according to which we speak.

True!

I need not occupy any time, to prove that the ability to spell with uniform correctness, is a rare possession amongst our people. It has not unfrequently been suggested that intelligence in the people is so necessary for the preservation of a republican government, that no person should be allowed to vote who could not both read and write. If, however, the suggestion means that no person should be allowed to vote, but such as could write without failures in spelling, I tremble at the almost universal disfranchisement. Our republic would be changed to an oligarchy at once.

[snip]

The advantages of teaching children, by beginning with whole words, are many. Nothing has to be untaught which has been once well taught. What is to be learned is affiliated to what is already known. The course of the pupil is constantly progressive. The acquisition of the language, even from its elements, becomes an intelligible process. The knowledge of new things is introduced through the knowledge of familiar things. At the age of three or four years, every child has command of a considerable vocabulary consisting of the names of persons, of animals, articles of dress, food, furniture, & c. The sounds of these names are familiar to the ear and to the organs of speech, and the ideas they represent are familiar to the mind. All that remains to be done, therefore, is to lead the eye to a like familiarity with their printed signs. But the alphabet, on the other hand, is wholly foreign to a child's existing knowledge. Having no relation to any thing known, it must be acquired entirely without collateral aids. In learning words, too, the child becomes accustomed to the form of the letters, and this acquaintance will assist him greatly in acquiring the alphabet, when the time for learning that shall arrive. I do not see, indeed, why a child should not learn to read as easily as he learns to talk, if taught in a similar manner.

[snip]

If we would know how to please children, we must know the sources of their pleasure. ... The principal sources are brilliant and variegated colrs, impressive forms, diversified motions, substances that can be lifted and weighed, and all whose dimensions, therefore, can be examined.

[snip]

In regard to all the other sources of pleasure, -- beauty, motion, music, memory, -- the alphabetic column presents an utter blank. There stands in silence and death, the stiff, perpendicular row of characters, lank, stark, immovable, without form or comeliness, and, as to signification, wholly void. They are skelton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions; and hence it is no wonder that the children look and feel so deathlike when compelled to face them. .... Now, it is upon this emptiness, blankness, silence, and death, that we compel children to fasten their eyes. To say nothing of the odor and fungousness of spelling-book paper, who can wonder at the energy of repulsion exerted upon quick-minded children by this exercise?

Apparently mimeograph paper sniffing was after Mann's time.

afterschooling circa 1910

YOUNG Thomas Jones came home from school with sad and solemn air;
He did not kiss his mother’s cheek nor pull his sister’s hair;
He hungered not for apples, and he spoke in dismal tones;
‘T was very clear misfortune drear had happened Thomas Jones.

“My precious child,” his mother cried, “what, what is troubling you?
You ‘re hurt–you ‘re ill–you ‘ve failed in school! Oh, tell us what to do!”
Then Thomas Jones made answer in a dull, despairing way:
“I ‘ve got to write an essay on ‘The Indian To-day.’”

His tallest sister ran to him, compassion in her eye;
His smallest sister pitied him–nor knew the reason why;
And all that happy family forsook its work and play
To hunt up information on “The Indian To-day.”

They read of Hiawatha and of sad Ramona’s woe–
You found encyclopedias where’er they chanced to go.
They bought a set of Cooper, and they searched it through and through,
While Thomas Jones sat mournfully and told them what to do.

For three whole days the library was like a moving-van.
“Is Mr. Jones,” each caller asked, “a literary man?”
And day by day more pitiful became young Thomas’ plight,
Because, alas! the more he read, the more he could not write.

“Write what you know,” his mother begged (she stirred not from his side).
“I do not know one single thing!”that wretched child replied.
“Oh, help me, won’t you ? Don’t you care?” Then when assistance came,
“Don’t tell me–don’t! It is n’t fair!”he pleaded just the same.

The night before the fateful day was quite the worst of all.
Black care upon the house of Jones descended like a pall.
All pleasure paled, all comfort failed, and laughter seemed a sin;
For “Oh, to-morrow,” Thomas wailed, “it must be handed in!”

When, lo! the voice of Great-aunt Jones came sternly through the door:
“I cannot stand this state of things one single minute more!
The training of a fractious child is plainly not my mission;
But–Thomas Jones, go straight upstairs and write that composition!”

And Thomas Jones went straight upstairs, and sat him down alone,
And–though I grant a stranger thing was surely never known–
In two short hours he returned serenely to display
Six neatly written pages on “The Indian To-day”!

His teacher read them to the class, and smiled a well-pleased smile;
She praised the simple language and the calmly flowing style;
“For while,” she said, “he does not rise to any lofty height,
‘T is wonderful how easily young Thomas Jones can write.”

I need a maiden aunt.

poem posted by historian Zachary M. Shreg at his terrific site 

The Race redux

Two summers ago, I wrote a number of posts on The Race between Education and Technology, a book I found revelatory. Via Greg Mankiw's blog, I've just come across economist Daron Acemoglu's recommendation of The Race as one of the top 5 books to read on inequality:

This is a really wonderful book. It gives a masterful outline of the standard economic model, where earnings are proportional to contribution, or to productivity. It highlights in a very clear manner what determines the productivities of different individuals and different groups. It takes its cue from a phrase that the famous Dutch economist, Jan Tinbergen coined. The key idea is that technological changes often increase the demand for more skilled workers, so in order to keep inequality in check you need to have a steady increase in the supply of skilled workers in the economy. He called this “the race between education and technology”. If the race is won by technology, inequality tends to increase, if the race is won by education, inequality tends to decrease.

The authors, Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, show that this is actually a pretty good model in terms of explaining the last 100 years or so of US history. They give an excellent historical account of how the US education system was formed and why it was very progressive, leading to a very large increase in the supply of educated workers, in the first half of the century. This created greater equality in the US than in many other parts of the world.

They also point to three things that have changed that picture over the last 30 to 40 years. One is that technology has become even more biased towards more skilled, higher earning workers than before. So, all else being equal, that will tend to increase inequality. Secondly, we’ve been going through a phase of globalisation. Things such as trading with China – where low-skill labour is much cheaper – are putting pressure on low wages. Third, and possibly most important, is that the US education system has been failing terribly at some level. We haven’t been able to increase the share of our youth that completes college or high school. It’s really remarkable, and most people wouldn’t actually guess this, but in the US, the cohorts that had the highest high-school graduation rates were the ones that were graduating in the middle of the 1960s. Our high-school graduation rate has actually been declining since then. If you look at college, it’s the same thing. This is hugely important, and it’s really quite shocking. It has a major effect on inequality, because it is making skills much more scarce then they should be.

Do Goldin and Katz go into the reasons why education is failing in the US?

They do discuss it, but nobody knows....It’s not that we’re spending less. In fact, we are spending more. It’s certainly not that college is not valued, it’s valued a lot. The college premium – what college graduates earn relative to high-school graduates – has been increasing rapidly. It’s not that the US is not investing enough in low-income schools. There has been a lot of investment in low-income schools.

[snip]

Goldin and Katz’s book shows that the college premium was higher in the early 1900s than it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Then it remains stable for several decades, and then it starts increasing again in the 1980s.
Daron Acemoglu on inequality

in a nutshell:

• the US education system has been failing terribly at some level

• the cohorts that had the highest high-school graduation rates were the ones that were graduating in the middle of the 1960s

He goes on to say that "What’s missing from the Goldin and Katz book is that they really don’t look at all at what’s going on in the top 10%," a point I think I recall Allison making (although Allison may have been talking about the the top 1 or 0.5%).

What people used to be able to read

palisadesk left this passage from John Gatto Taylor:

Looking back, abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent wherever such a thing mattered. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and you probably don’t want to know, not really, what people in those days considered literate; it’s too embarrassing. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold so well that a contemporary equivalent would have to move 10 million copies to match it. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet in 1818 we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?

By 1940, the literacy figure for all states stood at 96 percent for whites, 80 percent for blacks. Notice that for all the disadvantages blacks labored under, four of five were nevertheless literate. Six decades later, at the end of the twentieth century, the National Adult Literacy Survey and the National Assessment of Educational Progress say 40 percent of blacks and 17 percent of whites can’t read at all. Put another way, black illiteracy doubled, white illiteracy quadrupled. Before you think of anything else in regard to these numbers, think of this: we spend three to four times as much real money on schooling as we did sixty years ago, but sixty years ago virtually everyone, black or white, could read.

revolutionaries, architects and education systems

Do people at ed schools study the history of educations systems and paradigms, since they study the philosophy of education so much? It's just kind of amazing when you look into it, how much the course of education for so many has been steered by so few. Some people here have made hints to it before, but I discovered an article that made more intrigued.

Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary." Against School (Harper Magazine), John Gatto.

Gatto, the author of The Underground History of American Education, is not against education, though his view of school (as in the typical public school) is pretty extreme. He is against school the institution the compliance factory, the social engineering tool of architects attempting to construct society according to their vision. If Gatto's metaphor sounds pretty extreme, the idea isn't very new -- in his article he quotes 1924 satirists lamenting the anti-intellectualness of public schooling. The public has been fairly exposed to it since Pink Floyd's Another Brick In the Wall; the song isn't the revenge of a dropout-turned-musician. PF was composed of fairly good students -- competitive students of architecture and art -- yet they too, were "against School".
Some of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell's inspirations for their dystopic novels came from School. Probably for good reason.

There is often talk with this "reform vs. traditionalist" rhetoric as though it were that simple. What tradition, anyway? Has there ever been a golden age of education? I argue not really. The more you investigate the history of school (school anywhere!), the more it seems like the pages out of the history book of Latin America: revolutions, counter-revolutions, coups and counter-coups.

Of course, I don't totally agree with Gatto's picture, though I suppose he simplified the history for rhetorical purposes. If the political spectrum is to be brought into it, public education was a strange alliance of progressive and conservative (in the strictest sense of the word), bringing forth a system that was both radical yet reactionary. In the late 19th and early 20th century, Progressive activists pushed for public education of course, but reactionaries, were faced with the era of populism: ever-increasing mass literacy rates, a politically-awakened population and all of the things that come with small-d democracy.

I am reminded of the one time that my high school world history teacher suddenly asked us -- quite randomly -- if we knew the driving force for why public education was first implemented. Most of us replied with progressive explanations. His answer: factory owners were responsible for the explosion of public education, not the progressives. "Public education wasn't created to educate citizens. It was to train workers so they could work in factories." For a while, I took this as just another fact of history, but it took quite a bit of time for me to realise what he was getting at.

In a paradoxical way, the radical progressives were so ambitious and radical, they unwittingly played into the reactionaries' own hands. School wasn't just to be the place for academic lessons -- it was to be a tool of social engineering to create a more progressive society, a free and enlightened populace and unrestricted flow of ideas. For the reactionaries -- why not social engineering as well? You could also create a more manageable populace this way: disciplined, differentiated, divided, docile. What is "reform education," then? It is an attempt to reverse this early coup d'éducation and restore the original progressive objectives, like Sun Yat-Sen attempting to reverse the coup of Yuan Shikai after he had taken control of the First Chinese Republic. Perhaps not very well -- the reformers are not only divided, they have saboteurs within their ranks, much like the warlords who diverted Sun Yat-Sen's restoration objective.

Which results in the educational mess you might see in your child's classroom today. All of these paradigms and plays for power have been fought by comparatively few compared to the how many people these battles affect. Revolutions? What revolutions? Who knew there could be so much dirty politics involved in your child's education? But veteran parents and veteran teachers can easily attest to how much entrenched power play goes on, of course. Toss teachers' unions and booming education companies and you get a combat theatre!

This isn't merely about the woes of American education. I have been a student of both an American high school and a Singaporean secondary school and must say I found major faults with both experiences. Oh let me say -- despite the good teachers I found in both schools -- I hated high school. In contrast, in my current school -- there are no politics over educational paradigms or standardised assessments, thank goodness. More or less, professors have a free arm to run their class; student feedback is one of "checks" in the system. No rubrics, no standardised professor reports, except of the kind they might submit to Nature. But I hear at many colleges, the edupolitical battlefield is slowly creeping into the picture. It certainly exists in community colleges; I can attest to its presence in the local university I dual-enrolled in.

It is fascinating to explore how certain educational paradigms spread worldwide. There is a certain paradigm for example, that you might find to be common among "Asian tiger" nations like Japan, South Korea, The Republic of China on Taiwan, Singapore, etc. The nationalist movements of countries under colonial or imperial influence are partially responsible for spreading them. China is an interesting case with interesting parallels. The imperial examination system -- very reactionary and conservative, arguably quite anti-intellectual -- was overhauled by a young Guangxu emperor of the reformist faction. The only way China was to progress in the world, of course, if the countless "scholars" and "officials" produced by the system knew anything about math, science, and industry and not merely Confucian rhetoric.

Young Guangxu had good intentions, but alas, he was no Queen Elizabeth and he found himself outmanoeuvred by his more politically-savvy opponents at court. One of the consequences of this drastic reform was the sudden dismissal of countless officials and bureaucrats deemed "useless" by the Guangxu emperor, their removal of power, loss of salary (no pension), etc. After all, the Qing government was facing a major budget crisis. Endemic corruption, sinecures and general parasitism were placing a major strain on Qing resources. Alas, this made the Guangxu emperor quite unpopular among the "old school" (literally) bureaucracy and support conservative Empress Dowager Cixi, who was planning a military coup. Guangxu in desperation turned to Yuan Shikai, commander of the modernised Beiyang New Army. Yuan Shikai had carried out major institutional and technological reforms with his branch of the military -- surely he backed Guangxu's reformation plans, right? Wrong. Yuan Shikai realised supporting Guangxu was too risky: he betrayed Guangxu, who was arrested and deposed from power. Cixi effectively reversed most of Guangxu's reforms.

Young Guangxus -- parents, teachers, administrators alike -- beware. The sad fact of life is that it takes political savvy to be a reformer.

It turns out Yuan Shikai eventually betrayed Cixi's faction too, allying himself with the Tongmenghui republicans, a hodgepodge coalition of various revolutionary factions. Many members were young idealists educated in the West -- France, Germany, England, the US. Oh merry that this coincided with the new progressive education movement! The republicans abolished the imperial examination system and copied the new Western trends, including unwittingly some of its reactionary paradigms. Many new members of the government were only republican in name only; provincial governors or military commanders of a different generation than the students, they had allied themselves with the republicans during the Revolution but did not necessarily have their same aims. Ah! School! What a valuable political tool anywhere.

Yuan Shikai then betrayed the republicans and then exerted his own Machiavellian influence on China's education system. The education system split into two when the Communists took the mainland of course, but once again, a strange mix of radical and reactionary across the straits. Japan and Korea's education system have their own versions of the education story, especially since Japan was under the influence of militarism even as it carried out educational reformations in the 19th century. All engineered by very few people.

The architect of Singapore's modern education system as we know it was a People's Action Party official called Goh Keng Swee. (He was also responsible for much of Singapore's economic development.) Was he progressive? Conservative? PAP politics takes a mouthful to explain. Goh was interested in social welfare as an undergraduate. His graduate studies were in the London School of Economics. He returned to Singapore at a time of great social upheaval and aligned himself with such university buddies as Lee Kuan Yew and Toh Chin Chye, joined the fledgling PAP, and following their win in the elections, became Minister of Finance. The PAP was a centre-left party and quite revolutionary in nature -- it was a dark horse upstart party at the time. In part, the PAP rode to power on the back of its communist faction.

One thing that is particularly interesting is how the PAP inherited its power structure from the Leninist tradition: it still has a secretive and selective cadre system, which still serves as the "inner guard" of the party. It still has a Politburo (since renamed), a Central Executive Committee, and all the other power institutions you might find in a normal Communist Party. It's quite peculiar because with time, the PAP swung steadily towards the right and eventually became anticommunist. (The paradox is not unprecedented: the Kuomintang Nationalists also have a Leninist structure because of an initial Soviet-KMT alliance in the early 1920s.) The cracks in the paradoxical PAP opened up in 1961: the communist faction fought with Goh Keng Swee, Lee Kuan Yew and other moderate party leaders, giving Singapore an electoral drama it has not since seen for almost fifty years. The PAP had its own right-wing faction -- but one suspects they came to an internal compromise with moderate leaders. This transition was very silent, because LKY, a great orator, opponent of sedition laws and a passionate supporter of freedom of speech for the sake of something like "principle" in the 1960s, appears to reverse his position throughout the 1970s, turning very pragmatist until he is found justifying sedition laws and the regulation of political dissent in the 1980s. The radical had become the reactionary.

What of the impact on the education system? The education system has an uncanny bearing to the politics of the time. Singapore's education story is a little more complex than the others because of the division of the schooling into Chinese schools and English schools (which were more prestigious), and there was a struggle between the Chinese-language proponents and the English-language proponents too, mirroring the split between the Chinese-educated communists and the English-educated moderates educated in London. (The moderate-right divide is more mysterious, because the right-wing never broke with the Politburo leaders publicly.) In a way, it too is a mix of radical and reactionary. Goh Keng Swee, under influence from both left-wing and right-wing ideas, divided the Singapore education system into "streams," in a system more complicated than currently is today. One of the explicit aims of the Singapore education system was to train workers for Singapore's fledgling industrialisation. Essentially, there were streams devoted to that -- at the secondary school level it is seen today with such designations as Normal (Technical) and Normal (Academic). The Express stream can be analysed as a stream to produce a bureaucratic, professional and managerial class. Finally, a Special stream to produce Singapore's next generation of leaders, e.g. party members. All very clean, orderly and disciplined -- like a factory.

Goh wasn't the only architect: experts were recruited from all over the world. Experts from countries such as Japan, West Germany, Israel and the Soviet Union joined the Singapore development project. Many features of the Soviet education system can still be seen in the Singapore education system; our HDB public housing programme was asssisted by Soviet experts, since they had the most experience in constructing affordable public housing and the West generally failed at such programmes.

In a way, these architects were extremely brilliant people. The bar model used for primary school math in Singapore was created by a single individual (not GKS however). Goh was one of the experts who chose the right economic path for Singapore, promoting economic and social development while other developing nations suffered under planned economics and property seizures. Buyers of Singapore Math books know that Singapore's education system has been successful, in a way. But I must lament his vision: such is the problem with having a few architects design entire education systems. Having set forth to write about an ideal education system, I suppose it's not a bad thing to first write a tangent about lessons from past attempts at designing education.