US Education Policy is Confused

And now, a re-post from a brilliant education scholar who understands what matters in education and what needs to be changed.  Yong Zhao recently moved to Oregon to become the Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education, College of Education at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

You can read his recent post here.

His recent book Catching Up is also a gem.

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Subject Literacy vs. Test Scores

So I’ve spoken quite a bit in this space about how testing doesn’t lead to, or reveal, learning.  I’ve argued that a test will not tell you what a student has learned, only what they’ve remembered.  Recently I’ve also mentioned how the Chinese are turning their backs on standardization and testing because they are realizing that they can produce “grade-A” test takers, but that these same people are no good at “life”.  “Ultimate Prep” – remember?

Since I don’t make this stuff up, really, here’s some interesting information.

In 2008 the National Science Foundation conducted research which was reported in their “Science and Engineering Indicators” which measures science literacy – i.e., one’s understanding of science and engineering. One of their questions asked “Is the center of the earth very hot?”  88% of Americans answered correctly (“yes”), while only 39% of Chinese said “yes”.  One summary of the report, presented in the style of the Olympic games with medals awarded, showed the US at the top of the many countries involved, with 8 total medals, while China had 1 and India had 2.

This phenomenon of “high scores and low ability” is beginning to get some attention. Testing well is not worth very much, in the end.  What matters is what you “know”, and what you know is what you understand.  It is understanding that leads to thinking about a subject and to being able to be creative and innovative within it.

There is more support for this finding.  The 2007 book Collateral Damage reveals how high-stakes testing destroys ingenuity and education.  A survey of multinational corporations showed that  Chinese workers lacked ability as well as commitment to and passion for their work.  This held true even for engineers who had graduated from the best engineering schools.

The Chinese are reevaluating their schools because they are witnessing a growing creativity gap between their students and US students.  Our system leaves much to be desired, but chasing the Asian model should not be part of our “fix”.  (Will someone please tell the authorities – we need to repeal NCLB.)

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School is so “20th Century”

How long before we begin to hear this refrain?  Maybe from students, maybe from “experts”.

Given developments in today’s world, and they keep coming, it’s not far-fetched to think that the present traditional model is simply not up to the task, is outdated, and out-of-sync with the needs to modern life.

We have to get our view up to a higher level to see this.  We have to get out of the myopic perspective that is leading us into the abyss.   The “fixes” and “reforms” that are being discussed are all old-school ideas based on a system that is out of date and no longer applies to the world we live in.  Look at the pace of change today, look at the shifting landscape of business and our culture.  We are in the midst of significant change – not just a little “faster” or “newer”, like for the past 50 years… no, we’re in the midst of significant change in how things happen and how our lives function.

Those who will do well in this world, indeed those who will LEAD in this world are those who will be prepared for it.  Preparation requires solid thinking skills, which means thinking in principles and thinking creatively.

A recent story in the NY Times Magazine spoke about innovation leadership and reported that “we need help thinking”.  The business world is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to consultants – the article calls them “brains for hire” – who can “innovate” for them – and the form of innovation is creative thinking.  That’s it.  There simply aren’t many good people who can do this “in house”.

This is why “school” is outdated.  School as we’ve known it maybe served a purpose 50-100 years ago, I’m still not convinced it was the best model even for that world though, but it surely is wrong-headed today.  We need an education system that prepares for today: which means preparing students for how to prepare. See the difference?  We can no longer simply prepare for the present time because by the time students get out the other end twenty years later they are already “obsolete”.  We need to prepare students for the world that they will encounter in a time when that world doesn’t yet exist (!).  We need to equip them to solve problems that we haven’t even identified yet.  Scary?  Not in the least.  We’re up to this task- it’s called THINKING, and it’s the one thing that traditional education hasn’t done a very good job of “teaching”.

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More on Grades and Learning

So this story has been around some news circles of late: The Shadow Scholar.  Heard of him/her?  This person earns decent money working full time as a writer for students’ college papers.  That’s right. Paid to help students cheat.  Grad courses too, in ALL disciplines.

But why?  Because school/college isn’t about learning, it’s about grades.  Yes, that old rant of mine.  But hey – as long as the evidence keeps piling up… and until the system changes… there’s clearly a need to keep talking about it.  Otherwise the silence will die (what does that mean?  sounds like a good turn of phrase though).

This person has now written an essay explaining what he/she does, why and how he/she came to this profession.  It’s sad, really, but it’s simply another indicator of how massive of a phenomenon this is.

And yes, it’s caused by a system that says “get the grades and everyone’s happy and no one asks questions.”  So students chase the grades and move on.  Learning?  We’re not so much asking about that.  What does the author say? “I’ve never had a client complain that he’d been expelled from school, that the originality of his work had been questioned, that some disciplinary action had been taken.”

And he goes on with a hard question “For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?”  Well?  Exactly.  The SYSTEM is helping these “students’ to get by…. get the grades….. move on.

Solutions? Abandon the grades and start focusing on whether anyone is learning anything.  We remember learning, right?

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There’s no school like that?

It’s amazing how uninformed some people can be, people who should be informed.

The Atlantic had  a story in their October 2010 issue about how the DIY (do it yourself) movement had somehow tapped into what quality education needs to be like: learning by doing, by building, by exploring.  But, they complain, there aren’t any schools like this yet.  (!)  “When a kid builds… a kite, or  a birdhouse, she not only picks up math, physics… she also develops her creativity, resourcefulness, planning abilities, curiosity, and engagement with the world around her.  but since these things can’t be measured on a standardized test schools no longer focus on them.” (because they used to?!)

Some do actually do.  The Montessori schools very much value “learning by doing” and if you visit the websites of a few you’ll see that they also value “resourcefulness”, “creativity”, “curiosity” etc.  Kind of makes you wonder. The author even refers to a couple of researchers and psychologists – do none of these people know about this method of education that’s been around for 100 years, is growing hand-over-fist in recent decades, has an impressive track record of turning around failing public schools, and simply “gets the job done”?

After espousing the experimental model, the article states, “No such school exists”.  Unbelievable.  Not to worry, this author will be contacting that author.

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stop content delivery

This has simply got to be one of the death-knells of traditional education.  “Content delivery” is the idea that you go to school to be “taught” some “basic skills” by another person.

So long as the educational world holds this as its raison d’etre the problems of education will remain.  We need to move well beyond the idea that delivering content is the goal or purpose of education.  Does this sound so wrong?  Does it make you ask, “but, what then would education be?”?

Education needs to be about process.  It needs to be “orienting the learner to the process of learning”.  Once you’ve achieved this you can relax, the job has been done.  A learner who has learned what the process of self-development, exploration, inquiry and learning actually is, and how to go about it, doesn’t need you any more.  If you want to talk about “building a nation of lifelong learners” that shouldn’t mean a nation of people who keep learning new content, it should mean a nation of people who’ve learner how to learn, on their own.

You can’t achieve this goal with traditional methods of course.  Traditional methods are geared to the traditional model of delivering content: sit down, be quiet, comply, and remember.  That does not engage.  That does not create a culture of inquiry and exploration.  Yet, without these there is no learning.  Do not forget: remembering is not learning.  Memorization is not meaning.

Maybe we need to march in front of traditional schools and district offices with placards that read “STOP CONTENT DELIVERY NOW” – who’ll make the bumper sticker, the lapel pin?

Let’s change the education conversation so that meaning-making via engaged explorative work becomes the norm in all schools.  We want process, not content.  The content will come on its own anyway.

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deep into learning

“Yes, I know that… I just can’t explain it”.  Ever heard this? Ever SAID it?  If you “can’t explain it”, you DON’T know it.  Very simple.  It’s one of the reasons why writing things down in your own words is so valuable: it’s a test of your understanding.  When writing you have to use complete sentences, which are complete thoughts.  If what you are writing about is clear in your mind you can do this fairly easily.  If you have a weak grasp of your material the words will not flow,  or they will be vapid and vague.

There is significant research which delves into this area painstakingly.  It looks into what takes place in our mind, in our psychology, when we “think we know”.  It asks “what is going on in a student’s mind when they study and sense that ‘this is familiar to me’ and so moves on with a sense of knowing and thus being prepared?”  It turns out that familiarity is no indicator of understanding and so leads the learner away from further work on the topic prematurely.  Then you take the test (yes, the test!) and find you didn’t do so well despite “feeling like you knew the material”.  This also helps to begin to explain why there is often such poor ability to apply knowledge: that true test of understanding.

It turns out that in order to build understanding you need to do certain things in your mind: you need to actively think about the material.  This is the key.  Actively thinking means “turning over ideas”, it means “seeing how this content relates to other content”, it means helping your mind to integrate ideas.  THIS is what learning is.  And sadly, our schools do very little of this because they are geared towards memorization and regurgitation- not meaning making.  (You can read further about this claim here).

Once again, it is clear that if education is doing what it needs to do, namely, prepare young people to be able to live their lives successfully and contribute to society, then they need to learn with deep understanding.  We need schools that allow this to take place, which means a lot more than sitting and listening.  We need schools with ACTIVE LEARNERS.

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standards, yes!

Lest anyone interpret all my recent pradling on about “student interest” and “learning at one’s own pace” as suggesting that these “soft” and perhaps even “new age-inspired” educational values should replace the need for “academic excellence”, let me spill a few words about that.

Academic understanding simply means that a student grasps what is being presented.  Nothing wrong with that, it’s desirable even.  The point I’ve tried to make here is that our schools have focused exclusively on academics, on test scores, and two things have been made victim in this pursuit.  The first is that test scores – the only measure of “excellence” used – focus on right answers and not on understanding or meaning-making (more here).  Answers that one knows but which are not understood fully are empty- devoid of value for the “knower”.  We need an approach that builds meaning and understanding for  students, that’s a real measure of academic excellence.  Remembering data, answers, is not a measure of much, surely not of excellence.  The present belief that academic learning can be measured by tests and their scores is the first victim of this narrow concern.

The second victim is “all the rest”.  Ask an adult what makes people successful.  Ask them to describe people who “generally get along well in life” and what you’ll find is a lovely list of characteristics that actually make a difference in one;s life: perseverance, critical thinking, responsibility, compassion, leadership, self-discipline, and the like.  With the narrow pursuit of “excellent test scores” we’ve left behind all that really makes a difference.  As all the dislexic entrepreneurs how they got to where they are.  Similarly, it turns out that SAT scores are a terrible predictor (The SAT is a flawed predictor) of how someone will perform in college (yet it’s still a huge factor in who gets in and where).

Standards are huge, but let’s have standards for things that matter.  If an education is a process that helps you to be prepared to live your life fully and successfully, then much more will be required than the ability to take a test- and indeed, THAT will not prepare you for anything other than “test taking” which bears little resemblance to life.

Time to change the education conversation?  Let’s talk about standards for what?

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an emerging model

Slowly, as we look at how learning takes place – what the nature of learning is, we see a new model emerging.  As we follow the principles that are becoming clear – allowing student interest to determine work, allowing students to move forward when they are ready to – we see that the traditional classroom of yesterday and today does not allow for these things.  We see that what makes sense based on how learning happens is not what our schools weer modeled on.  This is why we’re changing the education conversation.

Recently I presented a small glimpse into how some of this might work (see post here) .  There’s much to be said to make clear how a classroom would work and the retraining that will be required in order for teachers to learn how to facilitate this new arrangement.  Fortunately much of this is already being done at some schools around the world. Following a different model of education, these environments have been emerging in rich and poor countries and have been shown to be successful across cultures.  They allow for student-lead interest (and still get all the work done!), they follow each student’s pace of learning so as to maximize the “fit” of learning and they reveal high student satisfaction.  I’m speaking of the Montessori schools.

These, it turns out, are not just “pre-schools” but extend into and through the elementary years, all the way to high school in some areas.  There’s much to be said here, but suffice it to say that a model already exists that incorporates the “how” of human learning.

With the rage that’s only growing about traditional schools, as depicted in a number of recent and soon-to-be released documentaries (Race to Nowhere, Waiting for Superman, The Cartel ) it is abundantly clear to a growing number of people that the “system” is broken and flawed.  We owe our children something better, something real, something based on the nature of learning and the nature of humanity.  Let’s put aside our special interests and pet projects and pursue what is actually, demonstrably, best for children (NOT for test scores, but for children).

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What is “the whole child”

From head to toe?  Is that it?  Somehow the clever people in the federal government who are working on what to include in the renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act (technically, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act: ESEA) have no clue what it means in education circles to speak of educating “the while child”.

What is their recommendation, in the spirit of moving away from a focus on test-scores and PURELY academic concerns?   Well, to them it means “a wide range of services”, like dental and health care, library services, summer and after-school enrichment, and college counseling. [As presented by lawmakers at a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in mid-April]  You’d think this was an SNL skit.  Really?  I mean, really?  That’s it?  That’s what you come up with to reform/improve traditional education by attending to the needs of the whole child?

Sheesh.  We’re doomed.  UNLESS all of us start to stand up and awaken the rest.

If there truly was an understanding of educating the whole child there would be mention of creativity, and not in the traditional sense of making sculptures with popsicle sticks or hard pasta, but creativity understood as innovative thinking (I’d even settle for “thinking”).  The “whole child” should concern healthy emotional development, true social skills and a wonderful array of “life” competencies like self-motivation, self-direction, self-regulation, problem-solving, and a general sense that each individual holds his/her own life in his/her hands: the responsibility of freedom.

It really is time to change the education conversation, if it’s not too late.

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