The Problem With Education

You won’t hear me say this much, but Keri Miller had a good show this morning on MPR.

The subject was edumacation,  specifically education reform.  Miller – who, like most former TV people, is a taste I’ve just not acquired on the radio – was interviewing Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and  John Richard Schrock, a bio prof and and director of biology education at Emporia State University.

At a casual listen, Petrilli was doing the usual party line – China is kicking our butts at education, and we need serious reforms, most of which involve pouring more money into the system (and I’ll freely cop to the fact that I may be shorting his side of the discussion).

Shrock was more interesting.  He noted that America has traditionally had some significant advantages over the rest of the world, at least when it comes to secondary and higher education.  While it’s become a chanting point that China, India and Europe teach three times as much science as the US, Shrock notes that most of that education, especially in China, has been traditionally focused on rote memorization – on “teaching to the test” – while the US’ more freeform system traditionally fosters critical thinking and creativity.   Metric:  The US, for all of the caterwauling about our system’s shortcomings, has over 200 Nobel Prizes in the sciences (for which one must actually do something useful, unlike the Peace Prize).  China: 0.

So far.

Shock also notes, however, that as the US system moves more and more toward rote memorization and “teaching to the test”, the Chinese are working on copying the part of our system that actually does work – the critical thinking, the questioning, the creativity.

There was some good food for thought.  To sum it up:

Quit the caterwauling about class sizes: Class sizes in the US have shrunk steadily over the past 30 years.  They are lower than at any point in the history of compulsory education.  They are smaller than in any of our competitor nations. But., Shrock notes, the US system has systematically chosen “quantity over quality” – his words; we’ve thrown a lot of teachers into the classrooms, but given them an exceedingly low bar to try to surmount.  More on that in a bit.

Teaching Sucks: I’m not going to bag on teachers; most of my family, myself included, have been teachers of some kind at one point or another.  Many of them do a great job.  But I remember even when I was in college, looking at the outlook for a career in education, and thinking “Um, no”.  It wasn’t the money – for all of the right’s caterwauling about inflated teacher salaries, teaching in most of the country doesn’t pay quite as well as someone with the same credentials gets in the private sector, although the benefits usually help make up for it.  It was the fact that even then, 25 and more years ago, the establishment was turning teaching into a commodity job.  Shrock noted that in many countries – Finland, Japan, China, India – teaching is a prestigious job; it happens to pay relatively well compared to rest of the regional job market (although Shrock also notes that in Finland in particular, the socialized economy limits prospects in the private sector), but it’s really a matter of respect.  In these places, teachers actually get to teach.

The philosophy of reducing class sizes, and creating lots and lots of teachers to fill those rooms, is of dubious benefit to students; it does, however, make teachers unions a much more powerful constituency.

Shrock also notes that if we in the US were less concerned about throwing teachers into classrooms to reduce class sizes, we could make some headway on making teaching – and the results we get from our schools – suck less.  If we had the same class sizes we did 30 years ago (and, I suspect, the same relative number of administrators), we could pay good teachers $100K a year – and they could actually earn it. But in the US, while we throw a lot of teachers at the problem, we hamstring the good ones with a cornucopia of niggling distractions; the US system is clogged with unfunded mandates that suck time away from actual learning; those mandates are accompanied by rafts of administrators – one for every teacher, now, up from something like 1:9 forty years ago – whose edicts and mandates and general flailing about really contributes nothing to teaching (and that’s without even looking at the travesty of the Star Superintendent system in major urban schools).

It’s not for nothing that you see so many excellent teachers leaving the big, unionized district schools to go to work for charter, private and parochial schools; frequently for less money, but for jobs in systems where they get to teach, rather than spend their days yelling “off what” when tier after tier of administration says “jump”.

And, most of all…:

Teaching To The Test Is Killing Us: Here’s an utterly bipartisan set of foulups.  With the advent of No Child Left Behind, American education became “accountable” – to a series of more or less arbitrary numbers, derived by an even more arbitrary process.  Schools can lose their funding, and teachers their jobs, based on students’ performance on a series of cookie-cutter, one size fits all standardized tests – which, I suggest, are the absolute worst way to measure learning across a broad population of students. And no, I don’t have a better way, but neither can I think of a worse way;  it’s caused American education, in the past ten or so years, to morph into the thing which it theretofore was not; a system that pushes rote memorization; a system that de-emphasizes critical thinking (worse than it already is in some of our more blighted districts), and that punishes creativity, both in students and in teachers.

Is it a wonder some teachers leave the field – to go into customer service?

The show is worth a listen, when it finally comes out on podcast.  Mark your calendars, I actually recommended a Keri Miller show.

27 thoughts on “The Problem With Education

  1. Sorry to burst your bubble, Mitch, but rote memorization and “teaching to the test” put us on the moon; discovered the atom and put it to use; created the transistor and well, built the country we live in today.

    Our decline started in the early 70’s…just about the time the teachers union gained enough clout to allow the left to start experimenting with our kids heads.

    There’s room for creative thinking and methods, of course, but the best way to improve academic success is to start with a solid grasp of the basics.

    The best way teach a kid that 2+2=4 is to teach them that 2+2=4.

  2. Why do we have to have some sort of national policy policy on the education of children? The idea that children are assets of the state should have died 80 years ago.
    Parents are the best judges of what their children should learn. Return public schools to the control of parents and the education of children will satisfy the parents — and that’s what the standard should be.

  3. As a hard-science type, I agree with swiftee here. For most subjects that are taught in junior-high and earlier rote memorization is the way to go. I’ve seen too many college kids have to pause, think, and waste time trying to decide what 8*7 is when they’re calculator deprived in a testing situation.

    What we’ve had since the 60s at least are “improvements” in teaching that have shortchanged the students from basic tasks that are still required in favor of the latest trendy philosophy.

    In high school you can start to challenge creativity, but before that you really need to build the necessary fundamentals to allow that exploration to have real meaning to the learning process.

    That’s not to say that teachers can’t do the fundamentals in a creative way, just that we need to demand a base level in fundamental skills such as basic mathematics, literacy, and reasoning from our students.

  4. The best way teach a kid that 2+2=4 is to teach them that 2+2=4.

    Let’s try to be clear here; I know there’s a place for memorization, and in just plain knowing the basics. In fourth grade, Ms. Walburn drilled us for months on the times tables; today I can multiply most short numbers in my head before my kids can find a calculator. And Mrs. Hill made us memorize all 23 of the linking verbs (have has had be am is are was were been being become became do does did shall will should would may might must can could); I know them pretty instinctively. There is a place for it.

    But Swiftee, JPA and Nerd: Shrock had some great anecdotes about interactions with Chinese scientists at the grad-student level who have their first interactions with US post-secondary education. That’s what I’m talking about. Again, worth a listen.

  5. My experience is that the first two years of college, whether in liberal arts or STEM disciplines — is exercise and rote memorization.
    I don’t think that the link between American public K-12 education and awarded Nobels is strong. How many of the awards went to the privately schooled? How many recipients went to public K-12 schools in the US at all?
    Is “Nobels awarded” even a good metric? Most people would be happy if their kids got out of the K-12 system with a good chance of being admitted to the college of their choice.

  6. Here’s one question that I read somewhere and have not seen answered (admittedly, that is a very small sample size)

    Quit the caterwauling about class sizes: Class sizes in the US have shrunk steadily over the past 30 years.

    Why is it necessary to have 18 or less (preferably 15; in an ideal world, 12) students per class in 12th grade, but it’s perfectly fine to have several hundred in Psych 1001 in college, taught 95% of the time by TAs and not the actual prof?

  7. Also, this kind of lunacy has got to stop, or we’re all done:

    http://tinyurl.com/32ybu2e

    After a ponderous start, all but six Bay State school districts passed the first test of a new anti-bullying law by filing blueprints before Dec. 31 on how to combat brutes.

    The six tardy districts — all small systems — are now scrambling to catch up, officials said.

    “We didn’t really jump at the urgency of it because of our tininess,” said Gosnold School Superintendent Russell F. Latham.

    The isolated island school off Falmouth has just four students, but anti-bullying will be part of the curriculum this year, Latham vowed.

    With 390 school districts and charter schools meeting the deadline, the next step is rolling out training for staff and anti-bullying lessons for kids.

    F*cking insanity.

  8. Why is it necessary to have 18 or less (preferably 15; in an ideal world, 12) students per class in 12th grade…

    Because no one has the balls to take the assholes out of the classrooms so the kids that *want* to be there can learn. It only takes one jagoff to turn a class of 20 students into an uncontrollable zoo.

    In MN, education is a constitutional mandate, but there is nothing that says we can’t create special schools to isolate the morons from the normal kids….say….

    Come to think about it, maybe we should create Democrat schools too…they could learn all about how evil the white man is, why bullying is just wrong, and (of course) teh gay all day.

  9. Swiftee wrote:
    In MN, education is a constitutional mandate, but there is nothing that says we can’t create special schools to isolate the morons from the normal kids

    Racist! Hissss!

  10. “Parents are the best judges of what their children should learn. Return public schools to the control of parents and the education of children will satisfy the parents — and that’s what the standard should be.”

    This may pose a problem, too, Terry.

    Far too many parents still look at school as a baby sitting service and don’t take an active role in their children’s education unless they are called into the counselor’s office or attend the parent-teacher conferences. My kids are both on their own now, contributing to society, but base my comments on my personal observations of the rapid decline of parental attendance of PTA meetings during the 90’s and early 2000’s. My neighbors, who still have children in elementary school, have commented on same. This is in Bloomington, too, where turnout has been historically good.

  11. Having taught at the high school and college levels, my take here is that rote memorization is entirely appropriate for things like basic arithmetic, history facts, and phonics. In China, it is moreover virtually indispensable for teaching reading with their character-based language.

    While teaching (including senior and grad level engineering labs), I could always tell whose elementary school teachers taught multiplication tables well–and vice versa. Bunch of red marks for arithmetic errors = poor elementary school teacher.

    However, when you get to, say, Newtonian physics, rote memorization is an outright disaster. It gives you a bunch of formulas, but the ability to think through a physical problem is flat out destroyed by memorization. Hence, memorization at the high school or college level tends to produce some very competent technicians….

    ….whose skills become obsolete after 5-10 years. Ouch!

  12. Newtonian physics Euclidean geometry ain’t, but “Ollie Had A Hairy Old Ass” still works pretty well for me.

  13. tends to produce some very competent technicians….whose skills become obsolete after 5-10 years. Ouch!

    Hence compulsory CEU’s

  14. Bubba, I always told my intro college physics students that this class was their worst nightmare come true: a course of nothing but word problems, and that there would rarely be any formula they could use directly. But even so, memorization of the equations was pretty much a requirement if they were to be able to apply them appropriately and in a timely manner.

    Mitch, I don’t think that Chinese students have all that many more problems in a grad program once they get over the cultural reluctance to challenge the hierarchy which is pretty much the requirement for a good Ph.D. topic — and to get out before all your hair turns gray (too many professors are willing to exploit you for as long as you let them, constantly shifting the goalposts). Once they get past that, it goes pretty well. But overcoming that worship of the hierarchy can be very, very difficult for many given the culture from which they come.

  15. Mitch, I don’t think that Chinese students have all that many more problems in a grad program once they get over the cultural reluctance

    I’d be ill-placed to argue. It was Dr. Shrock’s opinion.

  16. BossHoss, to me that sounds like a market solution in action.
    People who take very little interest in the education of their own children should not be given the privilege of choosing how other people’s children are educated.

  17. Having taught at the high school and college levels, my take here is that rote memorization is entirely appropriate for things like basic arithmetic, history facts, and phonics.

    “history facts,” Bubba? Surely you do not suggest our public K-12 educators actually teach historical facts? But… but… that would leave no time for all the soci*list propaganda they are required to brainwash our kids with.

    By the way, you can add high school science to rote memorization list.

  18. too many professors are willing to exploit you for as long as you let them, constantly shifting the goalposts..

    Leaving a few old newspaper clippings about Theodore Streleski usually sets things to rights.

  19. “I Did It Their Way” (to the tune of “My Way”) performed by Bright Morning Star

    I came, I bought the books, lived in the dorm, followed directions.
    I worked, I studied hard, made lots of friends that had connections.
    I crammed, they gave me grades, and may I say, not in a fair way,
    But more, much more than this, I did it their way.

    I learned so many things, although I know I’ll never use them.
    The courses that I took were all required, I didn’t choose them.
    You’ll find that to survive, it’s best to play the doctrinaire way
    And so I knuckled down and did it their way.

    Yes, there were times I wondered why
    I had to cringe when I could fly.
    I had my doubts, but after all,
    I clipped my wings, and learned to crawl.
    I learned to bend, and in the end
    I did it their way.

    And so, my fine young friends, now that I’m a full professor
    Where once I was oppressed, now I’ve become the cruel oppressor.
    With me you’ll learn to cope, you’ll learn to climb life’s golden stairway.
    Like me, you’ll see the light and do it their way.

    For what is a man? What can I do?
    Open your books. Read chapter two.
    And if it seems a bit routine,
    Don’t come to me, go see the dean.
    They get their way, I get my pay
    We do it their way!

  20. Swiftee, JPA and Nerd

    I also agree – which was exactly my point the other day when I expressed the importance of the 3 Rs…

    … before learning all the other things (which, in truth, depend on a firm grasp of the 3 Rs).

  21. I’m married to a special ed teacher. Her take on the education dollar is that many of them are thrown into her department, shorting the rest of the kids. There are reams of reports that need to be completed to document “progress’. it’s not PC to admit that “Mrs Gump, this is average. This is Forrest.” Worse, kids with serious behavior problems are dumped into the same area and steal the limited available time because the specail ed teachers have to be policemen and therapists. Outcomes are poor and of course the teachers get the blame, not the dysfunctional families that are addicted to welfare and other social engineering programs and manage to reproduce younger and faster than their counterparts in private schools and the ‘burbs.

  22. Her take on the education dollar is that many of them are thrown into her department, shorting the rest of the kids.

    I’ve heard the same.

    And I’d like to figure out some compliment for your wife for stating so, but my writing is (even) less good today than normal. I’ll just say thanks for the info.

  23. Actually, justplainangry, I’d hedge on memorization for high school science. Chemistry and biology? Sure. Physics? Nah. Wait until they get two semesters of calculus below their belt, and no formulas are required. Or, better yet, teach them along with how Newton derived it–but that would require far better geometry than most students get.

    But I’d add “foreign languages” for memorization, though.

    Lots of rote memorization is unnecessary, by the way, if the person memorizes “Barbara, celerent, darii, ferio” and so on.

  24. Pingback: links for 2011-01-04 « Marty Andrade

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.