Big Jolly Politics

politics in Harris County and Texas

Your Texas education dollars are being wasted

by

The next time some blabbermouth tells you that we need to spend more money on education in Texas, tell them to watch this video of the Beaumont Central Marching Band (warning – your ears could be damaged):

And I use “band” only because that is the official term – my goodness that was an awful noise. You’d think that the “band” “teacher” would try to teach these kids to blow into a trumpet so as to make a noise that doesn’t sound like fingernails on a chalkboard. Gosh awful noise.

Big Bird assaulting Mitt Romney? Paid for with your “scarce” tax dollars?

Are you kidding me? Someone’s head should roll (figuratively for those of you in Beaumont) for allowing this to happen. You can call the Beaumont ISD Superintendent, Dr. Timothy B. Chargois, at (409) 617-5132 to complain and tell him that his band is awful. Hard to even call it “music”.

Just say no to more funding for Texas schools and yes to vouchers to give kids that want to learn a chance.

Texas Education V: Language skill is the basic component of a “Knowledge-Based” Curriculum

by

Ed Hubbard

I want to thank “Izzy” again for his comments to the last post in this series.  I recommend to those of you who are following this series that you read that comment thread between Izzy and me to help understand in more depth some of what I will be discussing throughout the remainder of this series [http://www.bigjollypolitics.com/2012/08/27/texas-education-iv-a-case-study-in-the-failure-of-a-method-based-curriculum/].  In fact, if you haven’t been following these posts about education, you can catch up with us here:

  1. Texas Education: Revisiting our Foundation
  2. Texas Education II: Knowledge needed to be “an effective American Citizen in a global economy”
  3. Texas Education III: National Policy is not the Answer to the Problem in our Classrooms
  4. Texas Education IV: A Case Study in the Failure of a Method-Based Curriculum

Now, let’s dig into the foundation of the curriculum issue by discussing what I mean by a “knowledge-based” curriculum, and by discussing it in terms of the new mission I have proposed for “diffusing knowledge” in accordance with the Texas Constitution.

In this post, I am going to cite again to E.D. Hirsch, Jr.’s recent book, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools.  I am not citing to him so extensively because I think he is the only source, or even the best source for information related to “knowledge-based” education.  However, he has summarized so much of the research in cognitive science (“the study of how the mind processes information to obtain and use knowledge”) applied to effective education, and he has written more on this subject over such a long period of time, that his analysis is extremely helpful for our discussion.

What a generation of research since A Nation of Risk first appeared shows is that “high-order” skills (what many call “critical thinking” skills) can not be taught independently—that is, you can’t just teach students “how to think.”  For students to learn how to think, research in cognitive science tells us they have to be taught “content and vocabulary knowledge” through “a coherent, rational and sequential approach.” This approach builds and expands a student’s “working memory” of knowledge over years, and that working memory allows students to develop, and adults to use, such knowledge quickly to critically analyze and solve increasingly complex problems related to such knowledge (e.g., the more knowledge you effectively obtain about history, the broader and deeper your working memory will become of such knowledge, and that working memory will facilitate faster and more effective critical thinking using the historical, cause-and-effect method of analysis).

The broader the knowledge base developed across academic disciplines, the more likely it is that students will be able to critically think and problem solve within more than one academic discipline.  In essence, Hirsch, and others in his field, tell us that “Content is Skill, Skill Content.”

In Appendix 2 to The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, Hirsch presents five basic propositions derived from cognitive-science research that underlie “knowledge-based” education:

  1. The character of an academic skill is constrained by the narrow limitations of working memory.
  2. Academic skills have two components: procedures and contents.
  3. Procedural skills, such as turning letters into sounds, must initially be learned as content along with other content necessary to high-order skills.
  4. An advance in skill, whether in procedure or content, entails advance speed processing.
  5. A higher-order academic skill such as reading comprehension requires prior knowledge of domain-specific content; the higher-order for that domain does not readily transfer to other content domains.

In the remainder of this post, I want to focus primarily on three central concepts that Hirsch presents in these propositions—“working memory,” the components of procedure and content, and “advance speed processing”—and the most critical body of foundational knowledge upon which all further knowledge-based education relies:  language.

In fact, we can restate my original re-formulation of the mission of Texas public schools this way:

Any knowledge-based curriculum designed to provide all students with “the incremental foundation of truths, facts, and principles they will need as adults to function as effective American citizens in a global economy, together with the experiences and tools to use such knowledge effectively and wisely;” must be built on a strong foundation of language skills designed to expand working memory and create advance speed processing.

The term “working memory” describes that short-term memory we use to analyze situations and solve problems.  Apparently, this form of memory that allows us to manipulate data and make calculations and decision is very fleeting—normally just a few seconds.  Overcoming this limitation requires practice and repetition, followed by the gradual introduction of new data and then practice and repetition with the new data—and so on; so that over time we create a large and expansive working memory that allows us to react to new data and new situations quickly.

One easy example that Hirsch discusses is that we are not born knowing what “World War II” means.  It takes time to learn not just the word “world,” but also the content of that word as used in many contexts.  And the same goes for the word “war,” and the Roman Numeral “II”.  Moreover, it takes practice and repetition to understand that when used together, these words convey a concept that is specific and important, and that at once conveys temporal, historical, political, and cultural meanings that are critical for understanding so much that has been and is still being written every day about our society in newspapers and in books—all of which most of us immediately recognize.  But we didn’t recognize that term, let alone process its significance, the first time we read those words together.

The practice and repetition needed to build working memory comes from multiple sources.  The three words “world,” “war,” and “two,” may be introduced in an early vocabulary lesson; Roman Numerals may be introduced in a math or English class; the term “World War II” may be introduced in a history lesson, and then re-enforced in sentences studied for grammar and punctuation during an English class in which different contexts for the use and understanding of the term are introduced.  All of these interconnected sources during formal school instruction are needed to build “working memory.”

But so are sources from outside of school.  For instance, think what it might be like if you never grew up in a home where you heard the term “World War II” from a family member who served during the war, from a book discussing the war, from one of those old movies or documentaries on TV, or from just listening to general conversation among the adults in your life—you would not have been exposed to all the different contexts in which that term is used and, therefore, would not have as complete an understanding of the meaning of that term as other students in your class.  These life experiences build working memory, too, and if they are missing from a child’s experience, it can be difficult for them to make up the cumulative loss during a school day or year.

It is the lack of cross-disciplinary immersion in the vocabulary needed to build working memory, coupled with the lack of out-of-school exposure to such vocabulary, that impedes the ability of so many of the diverse students in our public schools from learning and understanding enough of the content of their education to develop “critical thinking” skills.

Compounding this problem is the failure in too many of our classrooms to recognize that the development of academic skill requires learning both procedure and content.  This especially is true of the language skills needed to build working memory.  As Peggy Tyre recently reported in The Writing Revolution published in the October, 2012 issue of The Atlantic, so many students are failing to reach their potential across so many disciplines because they have not been given the basic tools with which to convey complex thoughts.  Those innovative schools, like the New Dorp High School on Staten Island and The Winward School in White Plains, New York, which are daring to “go back to the future” by teaching grammar, conjunctions, and composition to their students throughout the curriculum, are seeing test scores exploding in every discipline, from science to history to language arts.

And the whole reason we build this working memory is to develop “advance speed processing.”  The term “advance speed processing” as Hirsch uses it, describes the necessary skill that a person needs to use working memory to analyze increasingly complex situations, and solve increasingly complex problems.  Returning to our earlier example, as you learn and practice with the concept of “World War II” through years of repetition, you can understand a myriad of related concepts and contexts, such as the adjective “post-war” that is so critical to understanding so much of what is written and said about modern economics, politics, diplomacy, art and literature. It is this speed of processing our working memory that allows us to think critically in any given field, or across disciplines.

The Texas classrooms of the 21st Century must be the incubators of working memory by diffusing procedural and content knowledge incrementally, and then through practice across every class and discipline.  And they must start this work by returning to the basics of teaching an ever-increasing vocabulary in the context of every discipline from the story problems in math, to the sentence diagrams in English, to the essays in history, because language is not just another academic discipline to learn—it is the fundamental body of knowledge to learn for all other knowledge to be processed and used effectively.

This all may sound easy, but in today’s public schools none of this will be easy, because too many of the children who walk into those schools lack exposure to the out-of-school experiences that support and foster the development of vocabulary and working memory.  In turn, that lack of exposure puts a tremendous burden on the teachers to instill and re-enforce this knowledge during the few hours each day that they have with these children.  And, then, too many of our teachers have not been trained, or been given the proper curriculum with which to provide these skills to their students.  So, any meaningful change will not happen overnight, but it must start now.

Luckily, there are several sources of ideas for new curricula that focus on teaching the knowledge needed to build working memory and “advance speed processing” among our children, which they will need in order to grow-up to be effective citizens.  In my next post, we’ll canvass some of these proposed curricula before we move on to discuss the changes needed in our classrooms and school facilities.

 

Texas Education IV: A Case Study in the Failure of a Method-Based Curriculum

by

Ed Hubbard

I want to thank “Izzy,” who is a frequent commentator on the posts here on Big Jolly Politics, for his very creative comment to my last post, because it helped crystalize for me how I need to start this discussion about reforming our curriculum and our classrooms—very carefully.

You see, one reason reform efforts over the last generation have been so ineffective is that the classroom has become the “third rail” in the debate over education, which we mere mortals dare not discuss—especially if we are conservatives.  When we “fools” have rushed in, we have been castigated by the “professionals” for not understanding the realities of teaching and the modern classroom, and our proposals have been dismissed as unenlightened attempts to find the answer to every issue in some bygone, Reaganesque “Golden Age” that never existed.  Unfortunately, we conservatives sometimes play into this narrative by the rhetoric we use and the battles we choose to fight.

So, at the outset of this portion of our discussion, let me clarify a few things.

First, I believe teaching is one of the hardest jobs to do well in our society, and I have the utmost admiration for those who pursue teaching as a career.  From the moment a teacher walks inside a school each morning to the moment he (or she) leaves at night, he is teaching—content, character, methods, and values—directly in the classroom and indirectly by observation and example.  And, this process continues every day of each school year for decades.   The reality is that the challenges teachers face have become more difficult over the last few decades as our student bodies have become larger and more culturally and intellectually diverse, as the mission of our public schools has become more opaque, and as the public’s willingness to underwrite the present system has been strained to the breaking point.  A primary objective for starting this discussion is to establish a more intelligible system that will help teachers meet their challenges more effectively, and that will gain the public’s confidence and support.

Second, I enter this discussion with a little more than a pedestrian interest.  I grew up in a family deeply devoted to education, in which my father served as member of a public school board, and worked on local education issues for many years.  In college, I served on the Faculty Curriculum Committee that revised our college’s core curriculum and graduation requirements, and on the college’s Long-Range Planning Committee.  Recently, I finished a four-year term as a member, officer, and Chair of the Board of Trustees of a local private school.  These experiences, together with my own study over the years, have provided me with insights into the challenges faced by educators, the different missions of public and private schools, the proper boundaries between management of a school as an entity and administration of the operations and classrooms of the school, and the ongoing process of strategic planning for a school.

Third, because public schools are by their nature “public,” there is a political component to the strategic planning for our school system.  Therefore, citizens, including old fools like me, have a responsibility to participate in that planning process.  Given the state of our public education, and the demands on our public budgets, this strategic planning process is long overdue in Texas.

Finally, I do believe that the first step of any strategic planning process is to define the mission of the entity, and only then to determine how to fulfill that mission.  My previous posts focused on offering a clarified mission, and with this post we will start to discuss how to fulfill it.  I am sure that some people fear that my stated mission, and the proposals to implement it, will “turn the clock back” on education.  To show that this view fundamentally misreads what I have said so far, I’ll briefly recap what I’ve said so far:

  • I agree with John Stuart Mill, who defined “education” in his Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews in 1867, as “the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising the level of improvement which has been attained…;” 
  • I agree with educators, such as John B. Conant and Allan Bloom, who argued that to provide the education that Mill described, there must be a unity of purpose underlying the curriculum of the school system;
  • I believe the unity of purpose for the public school system is provided in Article 7, Section 1, of the Texas Constitutions, which states: “A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools…;”
  • I have proposed a modern mission for our public school system that applies “the constitutional purpose of Texas education to the 21st Century challenges that will face our children and grandchildren.as a mission”:   “the incremental foundation of truths, facts, and principles they will need as adults to function as effective American citizens in a global economy, together with the experiences and tools to use such knowledge effectively and wisely;” and
  • The federal government should have little or no role in implementing this new mission, because the history of its involvement over the last few decades has been one of increased bureaucracy and inefficiency without any perceptible improvement in outcomes.

I am not trying to return to an age that never existed, but I am challenging the status quo of accepted practices within the current system that fails to prepare our children for the society they are entering.

Now, with these clarifications behind us, let us “fools” proceed to discuss the curriculum and the classrooms we will need to carry-out a unified mission in the 21st Century.

To do so, let’s start with the fictional classroom that Izzy described in his comment to my last post.  I am going to quote it at length (though I’ve done my best to fix the punctuation and paragraphs to enhance its readability) and then use it to discuss the problems illustrated by this story, which underlie the need for curricular reform.  I will then use these problems as discussion points for my next posts.

In Izzy’s story, we are shown a class of diverse students—probably a science class of unknown grade level—to whom the teacher is trying to teach the “scientific method”:

… The room darkened. I picked up the remote control and pushed ‘play’.  The overhead projector screen glowed blue then white, as the steps of the Scientific Method, listed in black letters became readable. Some students began writing in their journals. I walked back around my desk and stood before the darkened class and slightly shifted my expression.

“Ask a question,” I said, then paused.”

The first step in the Scientific method is….write this down young scientists,” then paused again. “Ask a question.”

The students wrote down step one of the Scientific Method.

“Let’s say that Antinio, has to go from his first period class All THE WAY to Biology without getting caught in ‘tardy sweep’.” I emphasized the words ALL THE WAY, because the students knew that English classes were just downstairs from our Biology classroom. I was being sarcastic. If students were tardy more than nine times, they would have to serve one day of in school suspension. Fifteen times and they would be suspended from school for a day. SWEEP was the term used by the administrators for rounding up tardy students between classes, from the halls and sending them to a common area with other tardy boys and girls.

“Ezweep ez boolcheet,” Antinio said out loud, in heavily Spanish accented english.

Christian, a Hispanic boy sitting on the other side of the classroom on the first row, half-laughed. “Hah,” he blurted out coyly, then, looked around the room for approval.

Raymond noisily wadded up a piece of paper and acted like he might try for a long shot at the garbage can. Carolina and Jasmina baited him, “chood eet, chood eet.”

“Raymond, don’t do that,” I said with a mocking pseudo plead. The projector screen glowed white with the steps of the scientific method. I stared at Raymond for one-half of a second then looked at Antonio and said, “Antinio, please don’t cuss.”  Antonio stared at me and didn’t say anything. Juanito sat up and pulled the earbuds out of his ears.

I paused, just for a second, and looked above the class at a National Geographic poster of ‘A Wetland Ecosystem’ on the back wall, and said, “Ask a question.” The class was silent.

“How do I geet frong inglich tu Biologia widhow  gettin’  caught  by the ‘Meegra?” Antonio asked.  Christian, Raymond, Desmond and several other students howled with laughter.

I paused and looked at Antonio. “RIGHT, ANTONIO,” I shouted! I said to the class, “How does Antinio get from English class to Biology without getting caught by the ‘Meegra?”  The class laughed.

“Iz lak ezweep por our daddys?” Juanito asked, sincerely, yet softly.

“VERY GOOD YOUNG SCIENTIST,” I said loudly! That’s step one of the scientific method. “Let’s give THAT ‘young scientist’ two claps!”  I, and most of the students clapped twice, clap, clap….

My guess is that many teachers face this same type of challenging situation many, many times a day in our public schools, and they each try to use a creative approach like the one this fictional teacher used to establish the point they are trying to teach.  But, with all due respect to our fictional teacher, the point she thought she had made was probably lost on these students, regardless of their momentary applause—and that is the problem with teaching with a method-based curriculum.

I want to put my critique in context, so let’s start with a few of the relevant findings from A Nation at Risk, which I referenced in my last post:

  • “Some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension.”
  • “About 13 percent of all 17-year-olds in the United States can be considered functionally illiterate.  Functional illiteracy among the minority youth may run as high as 40 percent.”
  • “Many 17-year-olds do not do not possess the ‘higher order’ intellectual skill we should expect of them.  Nearly 40 percent cannot draw inferences from written material; only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay; and only one-third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps.”
  •  “The teacher preparation curriculum is weighted heavily with courses in ‘educational methods’ at the expense of courses in subjects to be taught.  A survey of 1,350 institutions training teachers indicated that 41 percent of the time of elementary school teacher candidates is spent in education courses, which reduces the amount of time available for subject matter courses.”

Based on these findings, here are some of the problems with this episode:

Both the purpose of the lesson—teaching the Scientific Method—and the result—application of the first step to an unrelated, non-scientific scenario, is a waste of educational resources.

Cognitive scientists tell us that teaching a method of thinking without reference to the basic knowledge to which the methodology is to be applied, is a waste of time.  However, since A Nation at Risk was issued, much of the educational establishment in this country has re-doubled their efforts to teach such methodology with the hope that it would lead to an expansion of “‘higher order’ intellectual skill” among our children.

In 2007, in the journal American Educator, Donald T. Willingham presented an analysis of the relevant cognitive science studies in “Critical Thinking:  Why Is It So Hard to Teach?”. The upshot of the research that Willingham summarizes is that if critical thinking is taught as a methodology, e.g., the scientific method, the historical method, etc., without reference to the subject matter to which it applies and without repetition, it is not retained for future use by students.  E.D. Hirsch, Jr., expands on and addresses similar findings in his recent book, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools.

So, though our fictional teacher was justifiably gratified that there had been a momentary break-thru with the students, the break-thru promises to be just that—momentary.  It is unlikely that anything of value from the lesson will be retained by our fictional students for future application.

The language used by the students shows their functional illiteracy, and their lack of readiness for the lesson that is being presented.

These fictional students show virtually no functional grasp of the English language; certainly not enough of a grasp of English to understand the meaning of either “scientific” or “method,” let alone to understand, retain or use anything else related to the teacher’s lesson.  These students have not learned either of the necessary reading and listening skills: decoding; and comprehending. Without these skills, the long-term meaning of this lesson was lost on the students described in Izzy’s story.

The functional illiteracy displayed by these students displays a failure of the system to assimilate these students into the America they will inherit.

Why are our fictional students functionally illiterate in the language of our culture?  Because our curriculum fails to require instruction in the basic knowledge these children need in order to assimilate into our society, or as Mill described in 1867:  to become members of “the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and if possible for raising the level of improvement which has been attained….”

Hirsch makes this point persuasively in The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools:

… [E]ffective communication and intellectual competence require shared knowledge over a wide range of topics.  … they connect with something less tangible:  a sense of belonging to a wider community and a feeling of solidarity with other Americans.  When we become full members of the American speech community, we belong to a wider group toward which we feel a sense of loyalty.  …

Since language itself depends on shared knowledge and values as well as shared conventions, the aim of bringing children into the public speech community is a more than linguistic aim.  All children need to be taught the general knowledge that is silently assumed in that language community.  Our schools need to assimilate into the public sphere not just new immigrants but all of our children, regardless of family background.  That is the fundamental aim of schooling in a democracy and one that we are not serving very effectively today.

Studies show that most parents want schools to assimilate our children (A lot to be thankful for), and the Texas Constitution requires us to provide them with the knowledge needed to assimilate.

Depending on the age of our fictional students, changing their current life trajectory will take a lot of remedial effort as we transition from the present system to a new knowledge-based curriculum, but we can’t afford to see the students in this class five or ten years from now caught in the same situation.  So, in our next post, we’ll pick-up Izzy’s fictional class and discuss how to change these dynamics for future students.

Texas Education III: National Policy is not the Answer to the Problem in our Classrooms

by

Ed Hubbard

During the Carter Administration, Congress created the Department of Education.  Many conservatives denounced this move as federal usurpation of a power left to state and local governments, and Ronald Reagan advocated abolishing the agency.  His position of antipathy toward federal involvement in public education has been, more or less, the Republican Party’s official position ever since.

It is at least a little ironic, then, that much of the debate today over the proper curriculum to use in our public schools arose during the Reagan Administration as a result of A Nation at Risk, a 1983 report about the state of public education in our country, which was commissioned by Reagan’s Secretary of Education.  Indeed, the reaction to that report spawned three decades of ever-growing federal involvement in education under both Republican and Democratic administrations without any real improvement in the nation’s education.

Arguably, the most important findings in that report were

  • “Some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension.”
  • “About 13 percent of all 17-year-olds in the United States can be considered functionally illiterate.  Functional illiteracy among the minority youth may run as high as 40 percent.”
  • “Many 17-year-olds do not do not possess the ‘higher order’ intellectual skill we should expect of them.  Nearly 40 percent cannot draw inferences from written material; only one-fifth can write a persuasive essay; and only one-third can solve a mathematics problem requiring several steps.”
  • “For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”
  • “…the average citizen today is better educated and more knowledgeable than the average citizen of a generation ago—more literate, and exposed to more mathematics, literature, and science.  … Nevertheless, the average graduate of our schools and colleges today is not as well-educated as the average graduate of 25 to 35 years ago, when a much smaller proportion of our population completed high school and college.”
  • “The teacher preparation curriculum is weighted heavily with courses in ‘educational methods’ at the expense of courses in subjects to be taught.  A survey of 1,350 institutions training teachers indicated that 41 percent of the time of elementary school teacher candidates is spent in education courses, which reduces the amount of time available for subject matter courses.”

These findings alarmed the nation. The report also listed two interesting “Tools at Hand” for addressing these findings:

  • “our better understanding of learning and teaching and the implications of this knowledge for school practice, and the numerous examples of local success as a result of superior effort and effective dissemination;” and
  • “the equally sound tradition, from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 until today, that the Federal Government should supplement State, local, and other resources to foster national educational goals; ….”

The responses to this report flooded bookstores and public debate.  Among the many books and studies that would be published were two landmark works published in 1987.  That year Professor Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago wrote a significant critique of modern college education in The Closing of the American Mind; and E.D Hirsch published what became the foundation of the movement for a “core-knowledge” curriculum, Cultural Literacy.  Education departments of many universities doubled-down on method-based curricula in an effort to address the lack of “‘higher order’ intellectual skill” among high school graduates, while research of cognitive scientists began to support Hirsch’s theory about “core knowledge”. In Texas, Ross Perot spearheaded reforms through the legislature with the backing of Governor Clements, and George W. Bush later championed reforms that focused on testing and standards.  Various states and localities tried to inject competition and diversity into the system with vouchers, magnet schools, charter schools, and home schools.  Nationally, George H. W. Bush ran for President in 1988 to be our first “Education President,” and George W. Bush pushed for national standards and action through his “No Child Left Behind” legislative initiative.  Meanwhile, for the last 25 years Bill Bennett, E.D. Hirsch and others have tried to educate the nation on what we need to learn and how we need to learn it.

But any fair-minded person, looking at the results of all of this action over the last 29 years would have to concede that as we’ve tried to mount a national battle for better education little has improved, and in some places (like Detroit, where it recently was estimated that its school system suffers from a 75{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} drop-out rate before the 12th grade) it has gotten worse.  I believe it has gotten worse because we refused to start the reform where it was needed—in the local classroom with the curriculum teachers use to teach our children, and with the tools and facilities they use for teaching.  This is a predicament shared by communities throughout the country, but it is primarily a State and local problem to solve.

Over the course of the next few posts, I am going to address each of the findings listed above from A Nation at Risk in the context of the constitutional purpose of public education in Texas and the refinement of that purpose I have proposed in the first two posts of this series, to come up with the contours of a proposed curriculum we will need in our schools, and for the tools and facilities we will need to teach that curriculum.  I am going to present my arguments for a “core-knowledge” curriculum, rather than a “method-based” curriculum, discuss how such a curriculum could advance the purpose I have proposed, and outline how such a curriculum should be implemented.

But as I was writing the first post on those topics, I realized that we should pause for a moment and discuss an “800-pound gorilla” in the room—the history of federal involvement in public education in this country, and why federal regulation and money should not be used to “supplement State, local, and other resources” needed to address the classroom reforms I am proposing. In fact, I believe that it is precisely because of our pre-occupation with trying to find a national “silver bullet” to slay our educational problems that we have compounded the problems we face today.

Remember, my first post on this subject in which I quoted the reference in the Texas Declaration of Independence to Mexico’s failure to provide public education in the territory?  Well, that concern for public education didn’t occur to Texans out of thin air in 1836.  In fact, the drafters of A Nation at Risk were right that there has been a continental civic commitment to public education since the 1630s, when the first public school, Boston Latin School, opened in Massachusetts.  In turn, there has been a commitment of national resources since the inception of our national government to establish or supplement an educational infrastructure within the states.

For instance, under the regime of the Articles of Confederation, the national government started establishing an educational infrastructure for each territory prior to statehood. In the Land Ordinance of 1785, Congress stated:  “There shall be reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within the township….”  Then, in Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress stated:  “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged.”  These laws were among the few from the period of the Articles of Confederation, which were continued by the new Congress under the new Constitution.

This commitment to education at the time of our founding is exemplified by the actions of Thomas Jefferson.  He was the driving force behind the creation of three, distinct universities:  the United States Military Academy at West Point; the University of Michigan; and the University of Virginia. Each of these schools was established with a distinct purpose:  West Point would focus on the military sciences to create a trained officer corps for the defense of the country, and a network of gentlemen to lead our communities after leaving the service; Michigan would provide a practical education in the applied physical and industrial sciences, including agriculture and engineering; and Virginia would provide a liberal arts education, and training in the primary professions of medicine, law and the clergy.  Together, these institutions would provide society with models for the type of schools that would provide a full range of educational opportunities needed for the functioning of a free society.

For example, the “University of Michigania” (which Jefferson helped found in 1817, and which later became the University of Michigan) became the model for our land-grant colleges.  During the Civil War, our first Republican President proposed, and the Republican Congress enacted, the Morrill Act, that set aside land in each state for the “endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and mechanic arts,…in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life.”  The purpose of the Morrill Act had been a basic plank in the platforms of both the Whig and Republican parties since the 1830s.

In other words, for a century after the American Revolution, our founders, and the national government they created, implemented a national policy that provided states with the tools to create an educational infrastructure, from the township through college, which would provide citizens with the diffusion of knowledge and professions necessary for the functioning of a free government and economy.  When, by the 1870s, every state had adopted, either by constitution or statute, a system of public education, the federal role in education began to recede and education became almost solely a state and local issue.

However, the fact that there were now public school systems in every state did not mean that everyone sought, or was given an education—far from it; for not every community used the township model and built schools right away, and state laws did not make attendance mandatory throughout the whole country until much later.  Moreover, it took decades before the network of land-grant colleges was built and functioning, and, to this day, far less than half the children in this country attend any college or university.

In fact, given the demographics of the nation and the continuous influx and migration of people into and across the country, most children did not regularly attend high school until the Great Depression.  Then, as a result of the economic disaster, children were encouraged to stay in school and graduate from high school in order to reserve job opportunities for the adults in the community.  The public education system we know today is really a phenomenon of the post-World War II era of general prosperity and economic stability.

It is during this post-war period, as a national-defense response to Sputnik (and a civil-rights response to Brown v. the Board of Education), that the national government re-emerged as a player in educational policy.  This time, however, it inserted itself beyond its historic role of providing or supplementing educational infrastructure for the states (and beyond what was necessary to end segregation), and began dictating operations and curriculum.  In essence it inserted itself in an area where it lacked constitutional and institutional competence, and it imposed bureaucracies and inefficiencies on our schools, which never addressed the core problem—how our local schools should effectively educate the continuing influx of students of varying backgrounds and talents.  That continues to be a peculiarly local problem to solve.

I believe it is the attempt to absorb and educate the vast and ever-changing influx of students of varying backgrounds and talents since the Great Depression that is the cause of the paradox that the drafters of A Nation at Risk observed:

…the average citizen today is better educated and more knowledgeable than the average citizen of a generation ago—more literate, and exposed to more mathematics, literature, and science.  … Nevertheless, the average graduate of our schools and colleges today is not as well-educated as the average graduate of 25 to 35 years ago, when a much smaller proportion of our population completed high school and college.

This phenomena also explains why educational outcomes and drop-out rates vary so widely between localities and among the states—because the influx of diverse students has been so unevenly distributed across the country over the decades.  The challenges faced by schools in Los Angeles, Detroit and Houston differ substantially from each other, and from suburban and rural schools.

Any meaningful educational reform must start with the core-knowledge to be taught in local classrooms, while addressing the reality that a significant percentage of children of diverse backgrounds and talents will never complete primary and secondary levels of education, let alone attend and graduate from college.  While we try to retain these students in our schools as long as possible, and continue to raise their level of literacy, we must begin to focus their training on the “cultural literacy” they will need to be successful adults.  Therefore, we must tailor the public school curriculum at each grade level to expose as many of these children as possible to the rudiments of American citizenship and the global economy.  In the meantime, we must provide a more demanding curriculum at each higher grade level of school based on a strong foundation of “cultural literacy” in order to improve the quality of the knowledge of those who stay in school and graduate from high school.  Each local and state must have the flexibility to tailor this curriculum to the type of diverse student they must educate.

National standards and tests, or even state standardized tests with teachers “teaching to the tests,” may continue to measure our problems as they get worse, but they will not solve these problems.  Only local and state reforms will solve the problems our classrooms face.

I’ll start to look at how we address the specifics of a new curriculum in the next post.

Texas Education II: Knowledge needed to be “an effective American Citizen in a global economy”

by

Ed Hubbard

During the initial installment of this conversation about the future of Texas public education, I focused on the “general diffusion of knowledge” that is the constitutional purpose of our “system of public free schools,” under Article 7, Section 1 of the Texas Constitution.  Consistent with that constitutional purpose, I proposed a 21st Century mission for our public schools to provide Texas students with:

… the incremental foundation of truths, facts, and principles they will need as adults to function as effective American citizens in a global economy, together with the experiences and tools to use such knowledge effectively and wisely.

In this second post I want to delve into the meaning of this proposed mission in more depth before we try to take the step next in our discussion—a conversation about the curriculum that will be needed to pursue this mission.

It is fair to admit that none of us mortals know what the future will be.  The sky could actually fall—a Meteor could hit the Earth, the climate could change one way or the other in some drastic way, our world could be attacked by aliens from outer space, or the worst of our fears of an Armageddon could unfold—causing life to end on this planet as we have come to know it.  But most humans have learned from experience not to plan their lives based on the worst of their fears, or even the best of their dreams, but from the foundation of their experiences.  Applying this time-tested approach, I am looking toward the future from the vantage point of being a “young” member of the Baby Boom Generation in mid-2012.  From this perspective, I believe that the experiences of the past few decades point to some specific challenges that the next two or three generations of Americans will face during this century.  Our educational system should provide these next generations with the knowledge and tools they will need to meet these challenges.

The first of these challenges is of our own making—the rebuilding of society in America.  From its beginnings, America has been an experiment based on ideas and ideals forged by a Western Civilization whose defining moment occurred on a hill called Calvary almost 2,000 years ago.  This experiment has evolved since the early 1600s through trials and errors and triumphs, but the ideas and ideals always guided the experiment, and created the basis for a society of free people to exist and flourish.  However, over the last half-century, my generation has not only continued to test this system, but has so fundamentally altered the experiment that we have separated and isolated each other in ways that actually threaten the continuation of the experiment and the society it created.

If our children are to inherit the American experiment that we were taught was so exceptional, we must give them the knowledge of the ideas and ideals that formed it, and the tools with which to rebuild a 21st Century society based on the foundation of those ideas and ideals.  The re-construction must still allow for the spirit of innovation that has been a hallmark of our experiment, but our children must be given the knowledge to discern between innovations that strengthen and expand the original experiment, and change that destroys the experiment. They must realize that as we prize the gift of liberty we have learned through the ages that “no man is an island,” and citizens can not thrive without a home, a neighborhood, and a country to call their own.

This first challenge is related to the second challenge, because a new, and as yet undefined, global economic “civilization” is emerging in the likeness of the American experiment, and if we don’t understand the foundation of our own society, we will miss opportunities in this new economy. To say that there is a new economic civilization emerging is not to say that there will be “One World” of which we will pledge fidelity as new citizens.  Instead, what is emerging is a culture based on economic interaction among diverse people, which will co-exist with older regional political and cultural civilizations, and with nations and societies that comprise those older civilizations.

The second challenge the next few generations will face is how to work and thrive within this new economic civilization, and how to shape its formation for the better, while retaining an allegiance to family, neighborhood and country.  To meet this challenge our children and grandchildren will need knowledge of the American experiment and its Western Civilizational roots,  of how our experiment impacted the emergence and shape of this new civilization, and of the foundations of the other civilizations, nations and societies whose members are participating in this new civilization.  In addition to this philosophical, historical, and spiritual knowledge (and to the exposure to the social science disciplines that inform such knowledge), they must be provided with the knowledge of math and science sufficient to understand what comprises our physical world, and how the physical world works, and how the physical can be harnessed and manipulated to improve the human condition without destroying its essence.  They also will need to master more than one language in order to effectively communicate in, and understand the world in which they live.  Then, they will need the tools to effectively and respectfully use this knowledge as they engage in the new emerging civilization.

This second challenge is intertwined with the third and final challenge our posterity will face over the next 9 decades:  avoiding an Armageddon of our own making.  Avoiding war has never been an easy task.  History teaches us that, regardless of our best intentions, the more we interact with people of different cultures, the more these interactions will inevitably lead to frictions—and frictions lead to political, economic and cultural conflicts.  The challenge to the future is not just to keep these conflicts from leading to war, but from keeping conflicts and wars from leading to human destruction.  This challenge requires knowledge of those disciplines that used to be called, the “Liberal Arts”—the study of man and man’s nature—and the tools necessary to use those arts to effectively keep frictions from becoming catastrophic conflicts.

Now, will most of our children need all of the knowledge needed to address every challenge I have listed?  The answer to that question is clearly, “no”.  It will probably be true for our great-grandchildren as it is for us, that most of them will still spend their entire lives quietly raising families in local communities.  To the extent they ever become engaged directly in the wider world it will be through broader communications and entertainments, local interactions with people from different parts of the world, or the trips they will take outside of the United States.  But they all will share their citizenship as free people in a country that will remain crucial to the future of mankind—they will live the American experiment and be part of the foundation of the global economic civilization:  they will raise the children of the future; they will make the American products, provide the American services, or do the American research that will be traded within the global economic civilization; they will maintain the neighborhoods that keep this country prosperous and free, and they will choose the leaders who will make decisions and use the powers delegated to them to affect the future.  Therefore, regardless of their stations in life as adults, our posterity will need a foundational knowledge in how to be an American citizen, and how and why the global economic civilization is emerging and working.

The new mission I have been describing in these first two posts will require what is sometimes referred to as a “knowledge-based education,” rather than a “method-based education,” for its effective implementation.  The ongoing debate between a “knowledge-based education” and a “method-based education” is at the heart of the next topic we will discuss:  the proper curriculum needed to pursue a new, focused mission for public education.  But I want to end this post with a brief comment about a recent controversy related to this debate.

The Republican Party of Texas was criticized recently for its adoption of a platform plank entitled “Knowledge-based Education” during the June, 2012 State Convention.  The plank included the words “critical thinking” in a context that was interpreted by some critics as meaning that Republicans in Texas don’t want to people to think critically.  Although I would have worded the plank differently, this whole argument is beside the point—everyone wants an educational system that produces individuals who are able to critically think about the world in which they live; “critical thinking” is one of those tools our children will need as adults in order to use the knowledge they are taught effectively and wisely.  The real question for us to answer is, what is the best approach to education that will create effective critical thinkers?

As we will discuss in the next post, the consensus of cognitive scientists is that the attribute of “critical thinking” is difficult (if not impossible) to teach as a skill separate and apart from the core knowledge of a subject to which the critical thought is to be applied.  What such scientists are telling us is that we need a “knowledge-based” curriculum in order to develop critical thinkers.  Ironically, cognitive scientists are acknowledging what the drafters of the Texas Constitution originally advocated (and what the Texas Republican Platform is really advocating)—an education focused on a “general diffusion of knowledge.” How we can apply cognitive science to effectuate the requirement of Texas Constitution, as well as the modern mission I’ve proposed, is what I will address next.

Texas Education: Revisiting our Foundation

by

Ed Hubbard

Back in mid-June after the RPT convention in Fort Worth, I wrote a post in which I stated that one of my long-term plans was to help

… find a comprehensive answer to the structural and financial problems facing our educational system in our communities and across this state. 

I want to start this discussion now, because this issue affects virtually every aspect of state and local government in Texas, and its resolution will determine the future prosperity and happiness of the citizens of our state.

The modern Republican Party believes in the principles of federalism and limited government, which commits us to govern only to the extent necessary to preserve liberty and order, and to do so as locally as possible.  There is only one local institution in American life that has involved, at some time and in some way, every individual, every family, and every neighborhood:  school.  And the ripple effects of a school—both good and bad—have consequences for individuals, families and communities, which last a lifetime.  We have to commit as a party to get this policy issue right.

To get it right, we first must realize that the problem with our public education system actually consists of a complex web of issues that impact about 50{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} of our state government’s budget on top of the property taxes and bond debt incurred at the local level.  Lurking beneath the economics of our school system is a labyrinth of issues that must be addressed before we can get control of the economic issues effectively.  In essence, we must start from the foundation and work our way up to fix this edifice.  We have to start in the classroom and determine what education our children need to become effective citizens in the 21st Century, and how to provide that education to them.  Then, we need to figure out the facilities, teachers, and parental/community involvement we will need to provide that education while working to minimize the drop-out rate.  After we have a plan for education at the school and community level, we next will need to determine the optimal organizational structure for districts across the state to implement that plan, which should include a discussion of whether and how to inject competition into the system.  Finally, we can then budget the cost of transitioning to, and implementing, that plan and re-organization, and determine how to effectively raise the revenue needed to fund the budget with the lowest and fairest tax burden possible—and with no income tax.

Yes, I am talking about a complete review and re-organization of the present system, because I think the past 30 years of public debate and stalemate has shown that without such a comprehensive approach, no marginal change or testing process will create the educated citizenry that we need.  And we each need to be part of the discussion in order to give our legislators and school boards guidance as to how we want them to address and implement the changes that are needed.

So, I want to start this conversation with this post, and to start it at the foundation of the problem—understanding the purpose of our public education system and state government’s duty to fulfill that purpose. As with most fundamental public issues, the foundation starts with our constitution.  Article 7, Section 1 of the Texas Constitution provides both the purpose and the duty:

Support and Maintenance of System of Public Free Schools.  A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.

This current constitutional provision pertaining to education was adopted in 1876, but by that time Texans had long committed themselves to providing for public education.  The Texas Declaration of Independence of 1836 listed the failure of the Mexican government “to establish any public system of education…” as one of the reasons for declaring independence from Mexico.  Then, the first public school law in the Republic of Texas was enacted in 1840, which provided for setting aside over 17,000 acres of land in each county to support public education. Later upon statehood, the Texas Constitution of 1845 provided that 10{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} of the annual state tax revenue be set aside as a perpetual fund to support free public schools.  This early commitment to public education needs to be remembered as we try to understand the language of the current constitution.

And, as we continue our discussion about public education over several posts, we will come back to Article 7, Section 1 often.  But for this post I want to focus just on the purpose of the “system of public free schools” expressed in this provision.  Notice that the framers of the Texas Constitution very specifically identified the purpose of the public school system as “a general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people”.  Before we can reform how the State meets its duty to provide “an efficient system of public free schools,” we must better understand the express constitutional purpose for that system.

What did the framers mean by “a general diffusion of knowledge,” and specifically, what did they mean by “knowledge”?  If you separate the descriptions of the process of obtaining knowledge from the various dictionary definitions of the term “knowledge,” the picture becomes clearer.  For example, the Oxford English Dictionary includes this definition of “knowledge”:  “[i]n general sense:  … acquaintance with ascertained truths, facts, or principles;” while the American Heritage dictionary includes this definition:  “… [t]he sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned.” Distilling these two definitions and placing it in the context of the words of the Texas Constitution, I believe the framers meant that the purpose of the public school system was to provide “a general diffusion of the truth, facts, or principles that have been perceived, discovered or learned’ by man, which have been found over the course of human history to be “essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people.”

This reading of the constitutional purpose is consistent with the once-dominant view of the purpose of American education.  From the 1930s through the 1950s a great debate raged within academia over whether there should be a unifying purpose and idea underlying curriculum in this country.  At the forefront of the argument that there should be such unity, was the President of Harvard University, John B. Conant, who outlined his principles in 1945 in General Education in a Free Society.  In that book, Conant described the predicament of the then current state of, and debate over education, and what he believed should be its focus:

A supreme need of American education is for a unifying purpose and idea.  As recently as a century ago, no doubt existed about such a purpose:  it was to train the Christian citizen.  Nor was there doubt how this training was to be accomplished.  The student’s logical powers were to be formed by mathematics, his taste by Greek and Latin classics, his speech by rhetoric, and his ideals by Christian ethics…this enviable certainty both of goals and means has largely disappeared….  For some decades the mere excitement of enlarging the curriculum and making place for new subjects, new methods, and masses of new students seems quite pardonable to have absorbed the energies of schools and colleges….  In recent times, however, the question of unity has become insistent.  We are faced with a diversity of education which, if it has many virtues, nevertheless works against the good of society by helping to destroy the common ground of training and outlook on which any society depends.

…there are truths which none can be free to ignore, if one is to have that wisdom through which life can become useful.  These are the truths concerning the structure of the good life and concerning the factual conditions by which it may be achieved, truths comprising the goals of the free society.

As Conant states, there was a time when Americans knew what was meant by “truth, facts, or principles” that comprised “knowledge”.  But we haven’t followed Conants’ approach over the last half century, and so our “system of public free schools” in Texas (and across the country) has lost focus, has tried to do too much with less and less efficiency, and, in the process, has accomplished far less than we hoped.

We must change this dynamic, and all of its complex consequences on our State and communities, by first addressing the core problem—we must conform the constitutional purpose of Texas education to the 21st Century challenges that will face our children and grandchildren. To do that, we need to refocus the activity in our classrooms from pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade toward providing Texas students with the incremental foundation of truths, facts, and principles they will need as adults to function as effective American citizens in a global economy, together with the experiences and tools to use such knowledge effectively and wisely.  This means that our classrooms need to produce an educated citizenry, each of whom is capable of functioning at some appropriate level in our American society regardless of when they leave school, e.g., 9th grade, 12th grade, or later; and each of whom has the foundational tools with which they can engage with people from other societies and nations respectfully and productively throughout their lives.

What I just stated may appear to be self-evident—but it isn’t.  Attend any graduation ceremony today and you’ll hear speaker after speaker glorify the purpose of education as creating critical and creative people who will be ready to be citizens of the world.  This is lunacy.  First, to become critical and creative thinkers, you first must absorb core knowledge with which you can learn to be critical and creative—critical or creative thinking alone is nothing more than educated idiocy.  Second, there is not now, nor will there be in the lifetimes of anyone now living, a “world” to be a citizen of.  We will remain citizens of a nation or state, who will be engaged in the wider world comprised of other nations and states.  We need to know, appreciate and pledge allegiance to our own society and culture before we can ever truly understand and respect the diversity that exists among all societies and cultures.  Without being grounded in a society and culture, we will create intellectual and economic nomads, rather than an educated citizenry capable of succeeding in the world our children and grandchildren will inherit.

As part of this refocus toward the constitutional purpose of our educational system, the curriculum throughout all the departments of our public schools, during each grade level, should be tailored to meet this purpose.  Any other information or process that does not contribute to diffusing this foundational knowledge should be re-directed at age-appropriate levels to vocational schools, community and junior colleges, and our system of private and public colleges and universities—and to parents and churches.

If we don’t re-start the discussion over the future of education from some foundation like the one I have just proposed, we will never fix the myriad of associated problems, including

  • facilities,
  • staffing,
  • budgets,
  • taxes,
  • textbooks,
  • testing,
  • student and teacher performance,
  • tenure and pensions,
  • educating the children of illegal immigrants and children with special needs,
  • drop-out rates, and
  • organizational inefficiencies,

which plague the affordable delivery of effective education in this State, because we will not have a frame of reference from which to address these other issues.

I know what I have said here, though basic, is a lot to digest, and some of what I have written will be controversial.  So, before I build on these ideas, I’ll stop here for now and give you some time to digest and reflect.

Over the next few months, we will use Big Jolly Politics as a forum for presenting a continuing conversation about the future of education in this state from a conservative perspective, and we will invite other Republicans from our area with experience with these issues to participate as guest writers and participants in video forums to be posted on this blog. We hope this conversation will be lively and lead to effective change.