David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2

Ed is reading David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 1, and has just come to this part:

...Waronker says the academy has learned to get better control over students, and, on the day I visited, the school was well disciplined through the use of a bunch of subtle tricks.

For example, even though students move from one open area to the next, they line up single file, walk through an imaginary doorway, and greet the teacher before entering her domain.

Ed: The children need walls, so why not give them real walls?

Right!

Right!

I hadn't quite thought of it that way!

These kids need walls, but the Harvard-ed-school / Columbia Teachers College / UFT grownups, in their collective wisdom, have declined to provide them with walls. And David Brooks approves!

Does David Brooks live in a house without walls?

Work in an office without walls?

I bet he doesn't!

Why do we have walls, anyway? Why were walls invented? Does David Brooks ask himself these questions before he writes a column extolling giant classrooms with no walls? If rooms with no walls are such an all-fire great idea, how come nobody lives in geodesic domes? Answer me that, David Brooks!

And while we're on the subject of making disadvantaged children imagine the walls they need but don't have, how about imaginary books?

Imaginary teachers?

Imaginary learning?

They've probably got all those things at the New American Academy. I wouldn't be surprised.

Ed says he visited an open classroom in California years ago. It was chaos, a din. No one could learn anything in that environment.

Of course, they hadn't hit on the idea of training the kids to pretend they were inside a room with walls.

P.S. I do like this column by David Brooks very much.

and see:
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea

"When you visit The New American Academy, an elementary school serving poor minority kids in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, you see big open rooms with 60 students and four teachers. The students are generally in three clumps in different areas working on different activities. The teachers, especially the master teacher who is floating between the clumps, are on the move, hovering over one student, then the next. It is less like a factory for learning and more like a postindustrial workshop, or even an extended family compound.

The teachers are not solitary. They are constantly interacting as an ensemble. Students can see them working together and learning from each other. The students are controlled less by uniform rules than by the constant informal nudges from the teachers all around.

[snip]

[The principal] revitalized one of the most violent junior high schools in the South Bronx and with the strong backing of both Klein and Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers’ union, he was able to found his brainchild, The New American Academy.

[snip]

He has a grand theory to transform American education, which he developed with others at the Harvard School of Education. The American education model, he says, was actually copied from the 18th-century Prussian model^* designed to create docile subjects and factory workers. He wants schools to operate more like the networked collaborative world of today.

He talks fervently like a guerrilla leader up in the mountains with plans to take over the whole country."
The Relationship School By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 22, 2012

Yes, I just bet he does. Other people's children are always a tempting target of world conquest, it seems.

I wish David Brooks would stop writing about public schools. He doesn't seem to know anything about education per se, and what he thinks he knows about "the social animal" appears to have blinded him to seemingly every aspect of school apart from its social and moral elements. Learning, memory, knowledge, curriculum, the importance of deliberate practice: I've never seen David Brooks venture an opinion about the actual knowledge that does or does not get transmitted to the next generation inside a public school, or about the processes by which students do or do not acquire that knowledge.

As to classroom management, which Mary Damer once told me was the single most critical challenge facing any new teacher even if he's a Marine just coming out of the service (I agree), here is Brooks:

The New American Academy takes a different approach than the other exciting new education model, the “No Excuses” schools like Kipp Academy. New American is less structured. That was a problem at first, but Waronker says the academy has learned to get better control over students, and, on the day I visited, the school was well disciplined through the use of a bunch of subtle tricks.

For example, even though students move from one open area to the next, they line up single file, walk through an imaginary doorway, and greet the teacher before entering her domain.

That, my friends, is what you call a red flag.

They put the kids in an open classroom (remember those?), chaos ensued, so they invented imaginary doorways inside the big open classroom: imaginary doorways the kids had to be trained to imagine and use. Instructional time was taken away from reading, writing, and arithmetic and redirected to teaching disadvantaged kids to pretend to walk through a doorway that isn't there -- and all because the folks at Harvard School of Education couldn't be bothered to read up on the history of the open classroom or on anything behaviorists have figured out in the past 50 years.

And Brooks approves.

The New American Academy has two big advantages as a reform model. First, instead of running against the education establishment, it grows out of it and is being embraced by the teachers’ unions and the education schools. If it works, it can spread faster.

Second, it does a tremendous job of nurturing relationships. Since people learn from people they love, education is fundamentally about the relationship between a teacher and student.

Union-slash-Teachers College charter public schools with imaginary doorways and no curriculum! Yes, that should spread like wildfire. Parents have been clamoring for no curriculum and no doorways  for years.

Brooks's own children have all attended Jewish day schools in the D.C. area.

and see:
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

Hegemony

Hegemony, believe it or not, is a word I encountered frequently in graduate school.

Then, after finishing my Ph.D., I never heard it again, not that I recall.

Lately, though, I've found myself using the word hegemony not infrequently (God help me), using it in sentences like: "The public schools have hegemony." Or, worse: "Education schools have hegemony."

The institution of public education is so immense, so vast, so moneyed, and so intensively peopled that other corners of the culture, institutions and organizations that, by rights, ought to be entirely separate from public education, are not. Other institutions are taking their cues from public education whether they know it or not, and often they don't know it. So we see Everyday Math and Lucy Calkins in Catholic schools, and in charter schools, too.

Worst example for me personally: early on in C's sophomore year at his Jesuit high school, I think. I attended the annual Back to School Mother's Dinner, where the principal, during his remarks, told us that the school had instituted some kind of interdisciplinary required course for entering freshman because "teaching subjects in isolation is wrong."

Teaching subjects in isolation is wrong?!

This from the principal of a Jesuit school?

That's hegemony. The ideas of the ruling class hijack your mind.

Now it appears that the president of the University of Virginia has been pushed out of her job because she is not sufficiently committed to: technology, a core obsession of public schools and the public school establishment.

The Rector and Vice Rector who fired UVa's president seem to have sent each other op eds by David Brooks (writing about education), by John E. Chubb And Terry M. Moe (writing about education), and even by Atul Gawande (who appears to be to policy professionals what Malcolm Gladwell is to business professionals).

David Brooks, for God's sake! These people are reading op eds by David Brooks, and sending each other op eds by David Brooks, and then firing university presidents on the basis of op eds by David Brooks....who is possibly the last pundit on earth I would want anyone listening to on the subject of education.

Although David Brooks attended an elite university himself, although Brooks sends his own children to a Jewish day school, he seems to have no awareness that the values embodied in a major research university (and no doubt in a Jewish day school as well) are directly at odds with the values embodied by Teachers College.

That's hegemony. I haven't set foot inside a public school since the 1970s when I was a lad, but I think what Teachers College thinks.

See, e.g.:
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 1
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2

As for Moe and Chubb, they are knowledgeable people, but they've pinned their hopes for school choice on the "liberating" power of education technology. I sympathize, but Good luck with that.

Moe and Chubb, in my view, have not paid sufficient attention to what history tells us about just how liberating technology in public education has been to date. At least, in this exchange between Moe & Chubb and Larry Cuban, Cuban gets the better of the argument:

LC: In tracking such technological innovations as film, radio, television, videocassettes, and desktop computers over the past half century, I found a common cycle. First, the promoters’ exhilaration splashes over decisionmakers as they purchase and deploy equipment in schools and classrooms. Then academics conduct studies to determine the effectiveness of the innovation as compared to standard practice; they survey teachers and occasionally visit classrooms to see student and teacher use of the innovation. Academics often find that the technological innovation is just as good as—seldom superior to—conventional instruction in conveying information and teaching skills. They also find that classroom use is less than expected. Formal adoption of high-tech innovations does not mean teachers have total access to devices or use them on a daily basis. Such studies often unleash stinging rebukes of administrators and teachers for spending scarce dollars on expensive machinery that fails to display superiority over existing techniques of instruction and, even worse, is only occasionally used.

Few earnest champions of classroom technology understand the multiple and complicated roles teachers perform, address the realities of classrooms within age-graded schools, respect teacher expertise, or consider the practical questions teachers ask about any technological innovation that a school board and superintendent decide to adopt, buy, and deploy.

Public school "technology" is not new.

Online learning is not new.

We've had distance learning for years now -- where's the revolution?

Where's the disruption?

Where's the new revenue stream?

Answer: nowhere. There's no revolution, there's no disruption, and there's certainly no revenue stream. Instead we have Todd Oppenheimer publishing The Computer Delusion in 1997, and Clifford Stoll following up with High Tech Heretic in 2000. It's 2012 now, and they're still right.

Trouble is, nobody knows it, and the flipped classroom is hot! hot! hot! Our pundits expect major research universities to get with the program, and (one) reason our pundits expect major research universities to get with the program is that education schools have hegemony. Pundits receive their thoughts and views from Teachers College.

The only good news I can see in all this is that we still have university presidents who are capable of observing reality and framing a proper argument:

Dr. Sullivan said that online education was no panacea — and indeed, was “surprisingly expensive, has limited revenue potential and unless carefully managed can undermine the quality of instruction.”

Of course, we may not have these people around much longer.

Daniel Willigham on the UVa firing.

update 6/26/2012: Brooks grew up in an academic family. Father was an English professor, mother a traveling history instructor. Today he's recruiting teachers for public schools whose idea of history is this.

"How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution" (& the free for all)

The man behind the curtain

Diane Ravitch: Time for Congress to investigate Bill Gates' role in Common Core

And here is William McCallum, lead writer of CC math standards, winning friends and influencing people.

Ed and I were talking about McCallum's post last night. People who know him say he's a nice guy, and I'm sure that's true. But his post is a lollapalooza of name-calling and nitpicking, both of which continue apace in the comments thread.

Which took me aback, because it's not the tone I'm used to hearing college professors take in public. (It's not the tone I'm used to hearing college professors take in private.)

I'm used to college professors sounding....you know, professorial.

I never hear college professors sounding furiously wronged and internet-y.

For me, this situation is something of a first. I'm accustomed to academic content coming from publishing houses, which have corporate leaders and marketing departments, and which, as a consequence, do not have textbook authors venting in public.

But with Common Core, there's no corporate parent and no marketing department. There's just Bill Gates and the many NGO's, state departments of education, and think tanks he bankrolls, plus the federal Department of Education (whose head was previously bankrolled by Gates), so there's no party discipline. Gates appears to see himself as CEO and absolute ruler of his foundation in the same way he was CEO and absolute ruler of Microsoft, but when push comes to shove, where Common Core is concerned, he can't actually fire anyone.

He can't order Common Core defenders to vet their posts with marketing.

The federal government can't step in, either, mostly because the federal government isn't supposed to be writing national standards in the first place (not mandatory ones), and because Arne Duncan's one foray into enlightening suburban parents as to the non-brilliant state of their schools & their children was a debacle of epic proportion. For months now, we've have silence from the top.

So...the defense of Common Core is turning into a free-for-all, and the story-line is getting lost in a bombardment of "process" stories and op-eds about the tea party (bad) and the Democratic Party's standardized-test-hating base (also bad).^*

Op eds about the tea party and the Democratic base are bad for Common Core. I'm pretty sure.

They're bad because nobody likes being told they're an idiot for not agreeing with David Brooks -- especially not being told they're an idiot for not agreeing with David Brooks by David Brooks. Being told that only tea partiers and members of the Democratic Party's standardized-test-hating base don't like Common Core makes me not like Common Core. Also, it makes me want to join the tea party and the Democratic base.

Point is: if the defense of Common Core is to be left to volunteers, then Common Core is going to die an unusually painful death.

Bill Gates "Letter to Our Partners" (the aforementioned NGO's, state departments of education, and think tanks plus the federal Department of Education) is just the start.

I think.


^* David Brooks, has yet another bad idea.

Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

As a physicist, educator and father of five, I can say that Messrs. Duncan and Hastings do not understand education or the role of computer and Internet technology in it. A well-thought-out textbook or a live classroom demonstration does a much better job of conveying understanding than anything that can be done with computer or Internet technology.

Anyone who has watched students using these technologies will recognize that they are distractions from the hard work of education.

Jonathan Katz
Professor of Physics
Washington University
St. Louis

More technology isn't the answer to our educational needs
WSJ | September 24, 2011

Speaking of well-thought-out textbooks, one of the most oppressive aspects of "technology" in the schools is the replacement of textbooks by packets, which are fantastically difficult to keep track of, not just for the student but for the teacher, too. I speak as a creator of packets: I'm driving myself crazy.

It wasn't always thus. Back in the day, teachers ran off those damp, great-smelling, purple-print mimeographs. But mimeos were a limited production; teacher packeting didn't take off until the advent of the Xerox machine. I predict things are only going to get worse as people start buying personal scanners.

Add Google to photocopiers and scanners and you get all-packets-all-the-time. What a mess. Yet another rolling calamity on the horizon!

I tutor a boy in a neighboring town who doesn't appear to have a math textbook at all, and not because the school is using Terc. Last I heard, the school is using Terc, but the only book the teachers are actually using (it appears) is a test prep book from one of the test prep book companies. The teachers Xerox one-page review lessons out of the test prep book for the kids to collect in their binders. The paper-punch holes last a couple of weeks, then the sheets tear loose and slip out of the binder and down to the bottom of the backpack, where they live until the summer, when Mom goes through the crumpled wads of paper and tosses it all out.

Or, alternatively, when Mom goes through the crumpled wads of paper and discovers her child has failed two out of six units in math this year. On fractions! tofix to revise to fix torevise

Speaking of worksheets, does anyone know where to get a complete set of Prentice-Hall's fantastic grammar worksheets? (pdf file)

and see:
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

why students have to memorize things
extremely fast learning & extended working memory

Larry Summers has a really bad idea

In today's Times, Larry Summers weighs in on the question of what college students ought to learn in college.

Larry's answer: not too much, because the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog!

Larry bases his novel and highly original thesis (to wit: "factual mastery will become less and less important") on "what we now understand about how people learn."

(Does Harvard have node chairs, I wonder? Sounds like no.)

OK, I'm going to go look up calculus on the internet. I've always been interested in calculus, so now that I've received a mobile device for Christmas, I'm going to look it up. Then I'm going to collaborate with some friends who also looked up calculus on the internet to figure out what to do about the 21st century global world meltdown.

I'm going to do this because I've noticed that economists use calculus in their collaborative group papers.

[pause]

There is a reason why students must commit content to memory as opposed to looking it up on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog.

That reason has to do with working memory.

More anon.

What You (Really) Need to Know by Lawrence A. Summers

update: Why students have to memorize things
and see: Extremely fast learning & extended working memory

AND SEE:
The founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea
Barry Eichengreen has a really bad idea
President Obama has a really bad idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

The Daily has a really bad idea

The founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea

In last week's Wall Street Journal: A Digital Promise to Our Nation's Children.

Annotated.

Student achievement and educational attainment have stagnated in the U.S., and a host of our leading economic competitors are now out-educating us. [now?]

[snip]

Imagine, though, an online high-school physics course that uses videogame graphics power to teach atomic interactions, or a second-grade online math curriculum that automatically adapts to individual students' levels of knowledge.

[snip]

At its full potential, technology could personalize and accelerate instruction for students of all educational levels. [or not]

[snip]

Other countries are far ahead of us in creating 21st-century classrooms. South Korea, which has the highest college attainment rate in the world, will phase out textbooks and replace them with digital products by 2015 [note: products, not books]. Even Uruguay, a small country not known for leadership in technology, provides a computer for every student.

It is no secret that advances in educational technology have been hailed as breakthroughs in the past, only to disappoint. [true] Too often, the market for educational technology has been inefficient and fragmented. The nation's 14,000 school districts, more than a few of which have byzantine procurement systems, have been inefficient consumers and have failed to drive consistent demand. [we have to buy more technology?]

[snip]

To help remedy those gaps, the Department of Education is launching a unique public-private public-vendor partnership called Digital Promise.

Digital Promise is a bipartisan initiative that will be sustained primarily by the private sector [which will be sustained by a more efficient, less fragmented market and consistent demand] ... Federal seed money will fund the program's start-up, but it will be overseen by a board that includes business executives vendors—such as John Morgridge, the chairman emeritus of Cisco, and Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of Qualcomm—who will work with researchers, educators and other private-sector leaders vendors.

Digital Promise's aim is ambitious: to advance breakthrough technologies that transform teaching and learning in and out of the classroom, while creating a business environment that rewards innovation and entrepreneurship [for vendors].

Digital Promise can show leadership in areas such as helping build a more efficient market for [vendors of] education technology.


Arne Duncan and Reed Hastings
September 19, 2011 - WSJ
Mr. Duncan is the U.S. secretary of education. Mr. Hastings is the founder, chairman and CEO of Netflix and a former president of the California Board of Education.

One word: dismal.

and see:
speaking of technology and stagnant scores
oh brave new world!
codswallop, part 2
the founder, chair, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
Wash U professor on Reed Hastings' really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
David Brooks has a really good idea

David Brooks has a really good idea

David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

President Obama has a really bad idea

President Obama recently visited a school that "relies 100 percent on project-based learning." Not just visited, lauded.

Sigh.

Apparently the White House is launching a "High School Redesign" initiative, which appears to be supported by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Boards of Education:

Today's global economy requires new approaches to teaching and learning in America's high schools to foster problem solving and analysis, to support creativity and collaboration, and to connect student learning directly to the real world. Students learn best when they are engaged in complex projects and tasks aligned with their interests and when they work with others through practical examples and case studies that engage them in rigorous academics and in the application of knowledge.
Fact Sheet: Redesigning America's High Schools

Manor New Technology High School, a 100% project-based school, is cited as one of five Promising Examples of Redesigned High Schools.

From the President's speech:

• at Manor a history teacher might get together with a math teacher and develop a project about the impact of castles on world history and the engineering behind building castles
• or a group of students might be in charge of putting together a multimedia presentation about the moral dilemmas in literature as applied to WWII
• folks who use mathematical equations to build musical instruments
• tests on bungee jumping with rubber bands and weights
• robots that were being built
• all kinds of great stuff
• there's a lot of hands-on learning here
• part of what makes this place special is that there's all this integration, various subjects and actual projects, and young people doing and not just sitting there listening
• I could not be prouder of what's happening here at Manor

AND SEE:
Help Desk: Project-Based Learning
High School Redesign Gets Presidential Lift
Smartbrief on How to Make Project-Based Learning Work
Tips for Transitioning to Project-Based Learning
Manor New Technology High School

The founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

The good news

The Daily has a really bad idea

I love The Daily. Love, love, love. Read it every day.

That said, today's issue has an op-ed on the high cost of college that proposes, as a solution:

"Why not reduce undergraduate education to three years, while tacking an extra year onto high school?"^*
Josh Barro

Good God Almighty, as my father would have said.

Five years of public high school?

FIVE YEARS of Hunger Games in English and Core-Plus in math?

And here I was thinking everyone should skip senior year and go re-take algebra and English at their local community college instead.

(Is high school cheaper than community college? High school teachers here earn a great deal more than instructors in community colleges, but I don't know whether that's the case elsewhere.)

and see:
the founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

^* That's the pull. Full passage: Why not adopt the Quebec model and reduce undergraduate education to three years, while tacking an extra year onto high school? 

Goldin, Katz and fans

Goldin and Katz make two largely correct diagnostic points in The Race Between Education and Technology; that the United States got a significant head start on economic development because it expanded access to secondary and post-secondary education sooner than other countries, and we are no longer ahead in that regard. Their prescription, however, is largely incorrect. We can't get ahead of other countries by increasing the number of Americans graduating from college, because nearly all of the students who can do so are already trying.

Joanne Jacobs posted on this in the context of David Brooks' NYTimes column and I left this comment there:

>>>>
If no European country in 1950 had more than 30 percent of its older teens in school, that was an inefficiency that the United States could exploit to its advantage. But if every young person who can benefit from staying in school long enough to graduate is already doing so, there’s nothing further to exploit.

We can argue about what the ideal high school graduation rate should be, that is, what the criterion for graduation should be, and what needs to be done to ensure every child who is capable of meeting the criterion has resources and opportunity to do so. But it is delusional to believe that we can have both a meaningful criterion for graduation and a 100 percent graduation rate.

I suspect the true graduation rate should be between 80 and 85 percent. Maybe we could push it to 90, subject to the law of diminishing returns, if we poured every possible dollar into the last few marginal students — though, as Heckman has demonstrated, we’d get much higher returns if we invested the money when they were little.

Something similar operates all along the line of returns to increasing education. There are non-economic returns to more education, but they don’t depend on credentials. If everyone who is capable of benefiting economically from higher education is already able to earn a degree, there is no further inefficiency for the U.S. to exploit.

If other countries have larger percentages of their populations who are capable of benefiting from more years of education than the U.S. does, well, what are we supposed to do about that?

>>>>

Brooks cites economist James Heckman in support of early intervention, but Heckman's point is not that early intervention is a panacea, but that whatever it can accomplish will be most effective if it's done early rather than late.

I haven't read the Heckman paper Brooks is citing, but Heckman has said -- very circumspectly -- that African Americans and Hispanics begin school with similar performance deficits, but that Hispanics are much more likely to make them up.

From a 2005 column I wrote:

. . .
"Our analysis of the Hispanic data illuminates the traditional study of black-white differences and casts doubt on many conventional explanations of these differences since they do not apply to Hispanics who also suffer from many of the same disadvantages."

I know this is contrary to just about everything you've heard or read, so you're asking, "Who are these people?" They're Pedro Carneiro, University College London; James J. Heckman, University of Chicago, American Bar Foundation and University College London (and winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in economics for developing the kind of technical statistical analysis that undergirds this paper) and Dimitriy V. Masterov. The paper was written for the Institute for Labor Market Policy Evaluation, a part of the Swedish Ministry of Industry, Employment and Communications, in Uppsala, Sweden.

The paper is "Labor market discrimination and racial differences in premarket factors" (pdf file) and it's at on the Web.

Steve Sailer has written about the Brooks column. See also this post at the population genetics blog gnxp.

(For a bonus, the immediately preceding post dissects the media coverage of the math/gender study.)

Even if boys score higher than girls on standardized tests, they get lower grades

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college....

The sometimes controversial Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about this problem of "Boys at the back" in our public schools, illustrated in this chart posted by Mark Perry.

A reason is differences in 'noncognitive skills'

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.

The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.

That last sentence, which I've highlighted, may hold a key to the gender gap in school performance.  Boys lag girls in developing both noncognitive and literacy skills. Over time schools have pushed down more rigorous academic and organizational requirements to younger grades, making it more likely for boys to develop early gaps that often persist into the college years.

A related reason for the gender gap may be what David Brooks called the lack of cultural diversity.

… The education system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of person: one who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious. People who don’t fit this cultural ideal respond by disengaging and rebelling.

Far from all, but many of the people who don’t fit in are boys....

I wrote about this last year.

Brooks is describing what is often called the “feminization” of public schools.  This term is distasteful to some, probably because it reinforces gender stereotypes.  Whatever the label, it does appear that schools have become “culturally homogeneous” in a way that hurts boys more than girls.  It starts in elementary school when an early reader is told that he got the wrong answer because he picked “mad” instead of “sad” to describe how the boy in the story feels after he doesn’t get the bike he wanted for his birthday.  It continues through high school where group discussions in history class only allow expressions of compassion for victims of war but no praise for brilliant military maneuvers.  The message is clear – only certain types of behaviors and thoughts are welcome in the classroom.

There’s no doubt that students do need to be ”studious and industrious” to perform well academically.  It just seems that public schools are misguided in the methods they use in trying to develop those qualities in all students, particularly in boys.

Suggested reforms

Sommers points out that this gender gap should motivate schools to find ways to promote boys' academic achievement, as they have done for girls in recent cases when the gender gap has been reversed.  She suggests some changes that the British, the Canadians and the Australians have implemented.

... These include more boy-friendly reading assignments (science fiction, fantasy, sports, espionage, battles); more recess (where boys can engage in rough-and-tumble as a respite from classroom routine); campaigns to encourage male literacy; more single-sex classes; and more male teachers (and female teachers interested in the pedagogical challenges boys pose).

One example of how poor noncognitive skills can create a misalignment between grades and test scores

I know of a case where a middle school boy consistently earned almost perfect test scores in his social studies class and who reached the finals in his state's geography bee contest.  However, his overall grade was significantly lowered by his poor class notes, likely due to a deficit in "noncognitive skills".  Because of his grades, and because "behavior and work habits" counted so heavily in the admissions process, he was shut out of his high school's honors history track.  If not for his parents' intervention to override the school's policies, allowing him to enroll in the honors course, he might have languished in courses that were too easy and boring for him.  As it happened, he went on to graduate with honors and enroll in an elite university.

(A version of this post previously appeared on Cost of College.)

Reading Last

This is depressing.

[pause]

Well, at least the program the Dems want to switch the money to is moderately effective, as opposed to "Ineffective."

Surprising, isn't it, that a program that "integrates early childhood education, adult literacy, and parenting education into a unified family literacy program" would be ineffective.

And here I would have said the ONE SINGLE THING POOR PEOPLE NEED MOST is family literacy.

I wonder if David Brooks knows about this?



Reading First has worked
Reading Last
Head Start, Piaget & me

Head Start, Piaget, and me

Twenty-two years after the creation of the preschool program for low-income children, its cofounder, Edward Zigler, acknowledged, "We simply cannot inoculate children in one year against the ravages of a life of deprivation." Nevertheless, Zigler remains confident that Head Start brings some benefits to the children it serves.

On average, poor children enter school with far fewer vocabulary, literacy, math, and social skills than their middle-class peers. They start off a step behind and never catch up; the gap in academic proficiency follows them to the end of their schooling.

Since 1965, taxpayers have spent more than $66 billion on Head Start to provide comprehensive health, social, educational, and mental health services to poor children. Currently, the $6.6 billion program enrolls more than 900,000 three- and four-year-olds at a cost of roughly $7,000 per pupil.

[snip]

Today, nearly four decades since Head Start was launched, the school readiness gap between poor children and their middle-class peers remains stubbornly large. On average, low-income children enter kindergarten with a vocabulary a fraction of the size of their middle-class peers'. They are also less likely to know the letters of the alphabet or even how to follow words left to right across the printed page. Nicholas Zill, vice president of Westat, a research firm, notes, "Poor kids make gains in most of the elementary schools that they go to. The gains are parallel to those of more advantaged kids, but the gap still remains."

This achievement gap persists into high school. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (known as the "nation's report card"), poor students score substantially lower than their middle- and upper-income peers, at all three grades--4th, 8th, and 12th--in all subjects. In math, science, and history, three to four times as many middle- and upper-income students receive "proficient" scores when compared with poor students, who are much more likely to be rated as "below basic," the lowest level on the tests.

[snip]

Westat's Zill points out:

When you look at where Head Start has been in the last few years, they've been bending over backwards to avoid literacy skills. The Piagetian slant has been very strong. The ironic thing is that most Head Start parents want their kids to learn those skills.
source:
Head Start for Poor Children?

Yup.

That's ironic, alright.

Amazing how these low income parents want their kids to learn academic content.

Amazing how pundits don't seem to be able to get this.


how politics don't work

Have I ever mentioned my theory that you don't want to see the right and the left agreeing on stuff?

Just in case I haven't, and just in case you were inclined to disagree, check this out.

David Brooks is conservative.

Politika Erotika is not conservative. (Which we know, because.... ummm ..... Politika Erotika seems to have a lot of dirty photos accompanying re-postings of New York Times op-ed columns.)

OK, now that I've offended anyone who has a defined political position (I'm sorry! I am!) I'm going to crash ahead with this......

When you've got ill-informed pundits on the right banging on about character deficits in the poor, and ill-informed bloggers on the left re-posting conservative character deficit columns in full, your goose is cooked.

Our schools, not to mention our pundits (and our bloggers), need to stop worrying about everyone's character and start worrying about teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic.

And history and science.


Head Start, Piaget, and me
Reading Last

Over and over

To recap, the list of people with really bad ideas thus far:

• Kofi Annan
• David Brooks
• The Daily
• Barry Eichengreen
• Reed Hastings
• President Obama
• Larry Summers
• Robert Shiller

It's annoying enough that policy elites have to have bad ideas, but why do they always have to have the same bad idea?

petition

Via Whitney Tilson's education reform blog, a Democrats for Education Reform petition.

On my infinite to-do list, get some things up on the subject of the split within the Democratic Party on education.

Actually, that link to Kaus along with this David Brooks column is probably sufficient. Given that Linda Darling-Hammond is apparently overseeing his education transition team, it's not looking good for the DFER faction.

Joe Williams has said that when civil rights groups split off from teachers' unions the Democratic Party would be free to support charter schools.

That split appears to have happened, or to be in the process of happening.

And yet we've got Darling-Hammond.

lagging technology diffusion in real life

Remember this observation from The Race Between Education and Technology?

It is clear that the farmer with a relatively high level of education has tended to adopt productive innovations earlier than the farmer with relatively little education.

Greenscaper Bob describes the same phenomenon in indoor plantscaping, where he says the U.S. is 30 years behind Europe:

If we don't understand the difference between capillary action and osmosis, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we don’t understand that plants have no intelligence to start and stop “drinking” water, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we believe a clay pot and saucer is the best way to maintain plants in containers, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we think the term “self-watering” is synonymous with sub-irrigation, it's a symptom of an education problem.

I see these beliefs expressed every day of my blogging research on the web. They lead to an opinion that our level of science education in the field of gardening and horticulture is woefully weak. Is this an anomaly peculiar to the field of horticulture or is it symptomatic of our overall education?

David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece yesterday titled The Biggest Issue and benchmarked our education decline around 1975. I’ve been an eyewitness to much of this in the field of “ornamental” horticulture, which attracted high school students to land grant colleges by the thousands in the ‘70s.

This was the time of the biggest houseplant boom of all time. Ferns in macramé hangers were everywhere. As a mid-life career changer from IBM and the business of data processing I was caught up in it too. I seriously thought of buying a plant shop in Southern California. Instead, I found my way into the field of interior plantscaping.

That was the beginning of my discovery about the techno-averse, anti-business character of the ornamental horticulture world. As I discovered the prevailing practice of “poke and pour” interior plant maintenance, I started looking for better ways to water and found them.

I didn’t have to look too far. Sub-irrigation planters were already well established in Europe by the 1970s. They were, however, essentially unknown here in the U.S. Over thirty years later, thanks to our woefully deficient science education they still are.

Our education system is the top rung issue that will most likely guide my vote in the coming presidential election. I believe it is the issue that will have the greatest impact on the quality of life of our young people and future generations. We simply cannot afford to have “flat earth” believers competing in a flat earth global economy.

Greenscaper Bob
It's Our Education, Stupid
Inside Urban Green

Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been

Bong hits for bad op ed writers

I have to do this.

Because of the Tinker case in 1969, much of the cultural disarray of the past 35 years flowed out of schools and into society. Teachers today will tell you their discipline problems start at home.

This passage stands as a logic flopperoo of the first order.

(Well, possibly not the first order. I'm beginning to think that honor goes to David Brooks.)

Number one, let's agree that we've had 35 years of cultural disarray preceded by, apparently, cultural array.

Were teachers exempt from those 35 years of cultural disarray?

Were schools exempt?

Did 35 years of cultural disarray happen exclusively inside family homes and only then move outside the family home to schools and teachers?

And, uh, didn't the Tinker case happen outside the family home, in the schools & the courts?

I have to stop reading op-eds.


what can the federal government do about parents?
Bong hits for bad parents
Bong hits for bad op ed writers

Robert Shiller has a really bad idea

In the Times today:

Most people complete the majority of their formal education by their early 20s and expect to draw on it for the better part of a century. But a computer can learn in seconds most of the factual information that people get in high school and college, and there will be a great many generations of new computers and robots, improving at an exponential rate, before one long human lifetime has passed.

Two strains of thought seem to dominate the effort to deal with this problem. The first is that we teachers should define and provide to our students a certain kind of general, flexible, insight-bearing human learning that, we hope, cannot be replaced by computers. The second is that we need to make education more business-oriented, teaching about the real world and enabling a creative entrepreneurial process that, presumably, computers cannot duplicate. These two ideas are not necessarily in conflict.

What to Learn in College to Stay One Step Ahead of Computers by Robert J. Shiller | May 22, 2015

Number 1: General, flexible, insight-bearing human learning in the sense of "critical thinking" does not exist, and you would know this if you troubled yourself to dip into the relevant research in cognitive science before writing an op-ed for the New York Times.

Number 2: We already know what type of education produces general-flexible-insight-bearing-human-learning, and that is liberal education, precisely the kind of education Shiller is argues we should abandon because computers. Liberal education gives students a broad foundation in history, literature, science, math, and the social sciences, which they can then draw upon for a lifetime. I am living proof. I'm still using my Wellesley/Dartmouth education in psychology to write books about the brain. I learned nothing about the brain in college, but I can write about the brain today because I learned some fundamentals of biology, math, and psychology.

Number 3: New computers and robots don't invent themselves. If students don't study computer science in college and graduate school, there aren't going to be any new generations of computers and robots.

Speaking of which, Ed attended the Masters graduation ceremony at NYU last week. Every student receiving a degree in math was Asian, and all seemed to be Asian-Asian, not Asian American. Same with computer science.

Number 4: Business-oriented...real world...creative entrepreneurial process.... This is exactly what public schools have now moved on to. (In my district, Common Core has been swallowed whole by Tony Wagner, and I see the same process elsewhere.)

Why spend another four years, not to mention many thousands of dollars in tuition, room, and board, doing more of the same in college? Surely 13 years of pretend entrepreneurialism is sufficient.

Which reminds me.

C. took a marketing course this semester.

I was excited. I wanted to learn what there is to learn about marketing, too, and I figured I would.

Nope.

The course had no textbook, just case studies, which I never did manage to get my hands on. The class seems to have learned something about loss aversion, and also something about not dissing your initial contact at a hospital you're trying to sell major medical equipment to. Beyond that, nothing seems to have made much of an impression (which is not true with C.'s traditional liberal arts courses in history and literature).

As their final assignment for the course, students did a group project. C's group did theirs on tampons. (He was the only male in the group. So: tampons.)

The course did afford me one moment of joy.

C. came home and reported that the professor had given the class a marketing algorithm.

(Did I ever tell you that I taught C. to remember "algorithm" by having him recall "Al Gore has no rhythm"?)

The marketing class was mostly girls, and not one of them was having anything to do with the  algorithm. Not one. They wouldn't touch an algorithm with a 10-foot pole.

Not C.! Not only did C. deploy the algorithm--and with some alacrity, too--he was mildly scandalized by the fact that the rest of the class did not.

Also gratifying: C. seemed to have a pretty clear perception that There but for the grace of God go I. Sometimes having a mother who spends four years of her life reteaching the entire math curriculum at home comes in handy.

I've been savoring the moment ever since. My years of afterschooling didn't achieve what I wanted them to, but they did do what I needed them to. C. didn't make it to calculus (that's another whole story), but he is today a young adult who is on reasonably good terms with mathematics, and who will be able and willing to learn whatever math he needs to learn as an adult.


Other famous people with really bad ideas:
Kofi Annan
David Brooks
The Daily
Barry Eichengreen
Reed Hastings
President Obama
Larry Summers

The Race, and a model composition for writing instruction

The Race Between Education and Technology is getting attention, which is a relief. I was worried the book was going to drop like a stone to the bottom of the pond, because, politically speaking, it is betwixt and between. Goldin and Katz reject the liberal view that the policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were and are (primarily) responsible for rising inequality, while embracing the liberal view that education lowers inequality and that nearly everyone can go to college.

This is why I think of the book as revolutionary. I'm not sure it's right to call the book paradigm-shifting, but it's close. I was blown away by the opening chapters. (I stalled midway through the book, when I veered off to read the Book of Genesis, the first 12 chapters of The Odyssey, and Guns, Germs, and Steel. Now that that's over with, I'll be going back to The Race.)

[pause]

ah-hah!

Tyler Cowan says The Race is "the most important book on modern U.S. inequality to date," so I am vindicated. I will stick with my view that The Race is....the most important book on modern U.S. inequality to date.

That works.

Thus far I've seen two solid "con" reactions, one from Arnold Kling and the other from George Leef (have yet to read Leef's closely), but for the moment, I want to post a link to a fantastically good article on The Race: Supply Side Education by David Glenn. Glenn's piece is so good it could be taught in journalism courses. Precisely because The Race is so expectation-defying, it is not an easy book to write about, and he nailed it:

In a 1996 television interview that was partly shot in an elementary-school computer lab, Laura D'Andrea Tyson, who was then chair of Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, tried to explain rising inequality in America.

"In the early 1970s," Tyson said, "a college graduate earned something like 45 percent more than a high-school graduate. Today a college graduate earns 84 percent more than a high-school graduate. What's happened is the technology has increased the demands for higher skills."

Computers did it. Among both Democrats and Republicans, that is one of the most frequently cited explanations for the post-1975 spike in American wage inequality. As the story goes, information technology has transformed almost every job, increasing employers' thirst for workers with advanced skills and college credentials. In the lingo of economists, this is "skills-biased technological change."

But that story is at best a half-truth, according to a new book by two professors of economics at Harvard University. The authors, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, don't deny that American employers' demand for skills has been rising. But they say that that demand has been rising at a roughly constant rate for the last century. Contrary to popular belief, they argue, the personal computer and the Internet have not caused a sharp leap in employers' demand for skill.

So if demand doesn't explain the recent rise in inequality, what does? Look to the supply side of the equation, Goldin and Katz say: America simply isn't educating its citizens the way it used to.

In The Race Between Education and Technology (Belknap/Harvard University Press), Goldin and Katz emphasize that plenty of skills-biased technological change occurred long before anyone had heard of Bill Gates. The mass introduction of electric power in the 1910s, for example, increased the complexity of many jobs and increased employers' demand for skill. [for me, their analysis of the returns to education for blue collar workers early in the century is one of the most fascinating parts of the book -- will get passages posted soon]

But that rising demand, in Goldin and Katz's account, was outpaced during most of the 20th century by a soaring supply of educated workers. Between 1915 and 1950, the national high-school-graduation rate rose from roughly 15 percent to roughly 60 percent, and college attendance also spiked. As their numbers ballooned, educated workers could no longer command so much more in wages. Between 1915 and 1950, the college wage premium (the amount by which college graduates outearn people who hold only a high-school diploma) and the high-school wage premium (the amount by which high-school graduates out-earn high-school dropouts) both fell sharply. The postwar period famously saw a broad prosperity, with wages growing for people of all educational levels.

Then, around 1970, something changed. High-school graduation rates flattened near 70 percent, where they remain. College attendance continued to grow, but the college-completion rate — that is, the percentage of a population cohort that earns a bachelor's degree — stagnated for more than a decade.

[snip]

Demonstrating that the demand for skill has been roughly constant for a century is a tall order, and it's the element of Goldin and Katz's book that is most likely to draw skepticism from their colleagues. [so far, I haven't seen this] Their argument draws partly on data from the Iowa state census, which was one of the few during the first half of the century to collect detailed statistics about educational attainment.... [Barry Garelick used data from Iowa in his analysis of traditional math education, too]

Goldin and Katz concede that institutional features — trade policies, labor laws, and so on — have also helped to shape American inequality over the last century. But as a rough cut, they say, the simple supply and demand of skilled labor — the race between education and technology — tells most of the story.

"Education has not kept pace," says Katz. "In the early 20th century, we created almost universal access to high school. We have not done the same with college, which essentially we would need to have done to have kept this sort of widespread prosperity present."

One of the book's central questions is this: Given that the wage premiums for education have grown so strongly during the last 35 years, why haven't more young people responded by earning degrees?

One answer, Goldin and Katz say, is that the short-term barriers to college are steeper than they once were. "Among the college-ready," Katz says, "we need to make sure that they have the financial support to get into college. [emphasis added] We do an OK job with that, but we could do better. More than half of undergraduates work more than 20 hours a week. The loan burdens are tremendous. Tuition has been rising. It's clear that those things are taking a toll."

A more difficult answer, Katz says, has to do with the weaknesses of American public-school education. "There are a myriad of possible reasons for that," he says. "Some people say it's all about resources. Some people say we need to improve incentives for parents and teachers. Clearly, over the long run, early-childhood intervention programs may be very important. [clearly?] We need a continuum of investments. But per dollar, we're not doing so well in the K-12 system in the U.S. these days."

In a working paper released earlier this year, three Yale University economists — Joseph G. Altonji, Prashant Bharadwaj, and Fabian Lange — suggested that the slowdown in American educational attainment and skill development might be even worse than it appears.

[snip]

Goldin and Katz, meanwhile, are continuing to develop their model and are scrutinizing the recent growth of wage inequality within the group of people who hold college degrees. "There has been much more growth of inequality among college graduates than among noncollege workers," Katz says. Only some people, he says, are coming out of college with the high-level abstract-reasoning skills that fully complement the new information technologies and command high salaries. Workers with "midlevel" skills, by contrast, are more likely to see their tasks simply replaced by computers.

Does that mean, then, that too many people are going to college, and that the rewards of a B.A. are overrated, as some commentators have recently suggested?

"That's absolutely wrong," Katz says. "The reason we know that is the following: It's true that there's growing inequality among college graduates. But there's shrinking inequality among noncollege workers. The market is very bad for people with only a high-school diploma — they're not doing much better than people who dropped out in the eighth grade. So the return [on investment] to college is still very high. Even if you wind up in the bottom half of the college group, you're still much better off than in the top half of the high-school group."

If you're at all interested in this subject, it's worth reading the whole article -- and anyone who's teaching high school or college-level composition might want to consider having students read and analyze Green's work, too. (I would pay particular attention to Green's ability to assess and speak to the reader's assumptions.)

I have to get to the city, so will knock off for now.

Will be back with thoughts on Kling, Leef, and David Brooks' column on the book later.

Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been