New Incentives for Education Reform

Leaving No Child Left Behind, Behind

The PBS NewsHour this evening had an article reporting on the apparent conflict between a school's rating based on the standardized tests and the results of an "in person" visit by the NewsHour's education reporter.  Although centered on a specific elementary school, the story told the tale of the national confusion about the question.

What can be done with an overly expensive, largely ineffective education system populated by snarling teachers' unions on one side and reckless, budget cutting ideologues on the other?

Although less popular than ants at a picnic, the federal standardized testing was supposed to address the dilemma head on.  Legislators in the Congress, led by the ever so stingy Bush Jr., found themselves frustrated at the impenetrable defensive shield the educational system was able to prop up at a moment's notice. 

Following the autocrat's quiet penchant for constantly increasing the size of government, increasing the expense of everything and increasing the degree of federal penetration into the lives of citizens, No Child Left Behind was born after a difficult delivery.  Although the initial program touted a few mystical goals concerning educational outcomes, it turned out to be a slick GOPCon way of diverting costs from the federal coffers to the states, freeing up general fund dollars for more tax cuts.

However ironic it may seem in afterthought, the No Child Left Behind scheme sold itself on the traditional GOPCon faux-value of accountability.

New Mexico is an excellent example of the program's real world outcomes.  A poor state, New Mexico was already devoting a hefty portion of its annual revenues to education.  Once the initial glory of No Child Left Behind faded like a week old rose, the cost limitations of implementing the over priced program made things which were already pretty bad, even worse.

The 2011 graduation rates from Albuquerque's public high schools -- and for the entire state -- remained quivering on the brink of total failure.  New Mexico squeaked past Utah to become the 49th in the country for high school graduation.

The PR Conflict

Teachers and administrators were eager to re-image the standardized testing as a financial coercion to abandon their previous "high borne" educational policy in favor of a federally imposed new set of standards.  Although persuasive in the media coverage, the threat still couldn't grow teeth.  Students were failing the standardized tests just as regularly as they failed the tests they replaced.

When fascist throwbacks like the tea baggers in the Capitol of Wisconsin saw an opening to attack expensive teachers' compensation and benefit packages, they very predictably targeted the collective bargaining structure.  Although, in the end, citizens of Wisconsin joined the outrage at such action, Wisconsin parents with children in public schools were a bit more reluctant.

For these parents, the educational outcomes of the public education system were no longer a compelling component of the State's normally progressive inclination to defend the teachers' unions and collective bargaining, in general.

The Manufactured Confusion

Yes, it's difficult to conjure up a believable comparison between past memories of a well paid, well funded and well managed public school system and the current state.  Yes, it's far too easy to compare outcomes of 2011 to those same outcomes when the parents were in public schools a few decades ago.  Yes, the incendiary attacks on teachers' wages and benefits made by the GOPCons (and the Koch Brothers) in the State House gained traction with a population struggling to put food on the table.

However, there is an "elephant in the living room."  Further, like most elephants, this one is not particularly secretive.  Parents are not oblivious to how much their children have learned from attending public schools.  Their discomfort with the current state of educational outcomes may not be expressed in specific words, but these unsettled parents have a distinct "feeling" that they are watching their off spring being herded into a future as "wage slaves."

It's worse.  Barely literate future wage slaves.

The white haired teacher with thirty years of seniority can bandy forth a few gaseous comments about "critical thinking."  A concerned school principal can add wrinkles to his already "sincerely troubled" visage while touting the "new possibilities" of better targeted job training.  Yet, the fundamentals of the education effort we now have seems to be, well, fundamentally, off track.

Meanwhile, amid the unwanted pregnancies, petty crimes, drug use, vandalism and simple adolescent malaise, the high school graduation rate hovers around a stagnant 50-60%.  Further, the educational outcomes for those who do graduate seems suspicious all by itself.  There seems to be a certain something about "educated youth" in 2011 which is ever so slightly different than it was 20 years ago.

The question is a simple one.  "How can what goes on in the classrooms of our public education system become exciting?  Engaging?"

One Thing At A Time

This posting could go on to be longer than a Manhattan Yellow Pages if we were to consider all the faults and foibles and an equal collection of mitigating suggestions for solutions.  However, if we linger on the "exciting" and "engaging" aspects and begin to think of directly associated those things with the graduation rates, we may reveal a small, yet decisive starting point in our dreams of effective reform.

The premise is straightforward.

If classroom content becomes more "exciting" and "engaging," students will be inclined to energetically continue with the process until they graduate, whatever that might mean in the quality of educational outcomes.  Further, the "exciting" and "engaging" sides of this are not isolated in the final years of the program, but filter down through all the years beginning in the earliest classes in grade school.

There's plenty of blame to go around.  Depending on what position one might hold in the over all scheme of things -- parent, legislator, childless tax payer, teacher, administrator -- there is a corresponding lament which "explains" the dismal outcomes.

For now, let's target the teachers.

This posting is about incentives.  Currently, floating personal prospects of being a teacher -- including job security, slowly increasing salaries, tenure and slowly increasing benefits packages -- are considered to be adequate incentives to "get the job done" or, at least, the maintain a cadre of warm bodies to sit at the desks.

Here, MeanMesa is proposing an alternative incentive system, one which gleefully dances over all the other pressing issues to focus exclusively on the graduation rate problems.  Happy dreaming holds the promise that solving this difficulty may, along the way, collect a few of the other dilemmas and resolve some of their fundamental shortcomings, too.

The New Incentive System for Education Reform

In this age of computers, tracking an individual student through the entire period of public education has become quite manageable.  The new paradigm of graduation will be one which includes not just the high school principal handing out diplomas, but also every teacher who has participated in this course of public education since kindergarten.

After all, hasn't every individual teacher this student has encountered all along the way either contributed or inhibited the likelihood of this favorable outcome?  Why shouldn't a teacher's compensation system also be included in this consolidated concept?

The specific incentive we are considering here is to pay every one of these teachers a commission bonus for individual students who finally graduate, even years later.

This means that if you are a third grade, elementary school teacher, you will receive a bonus when one of your students graduates from high school after ten years have passed from the time he sat in your class room.

This approach strips some of the overly convenient "bite" out of the pressing impact of the  standardized tests.  The unpopular vagaries of arbitrary emphasis imposed by such tests should probably remain a part of the mix, but this long term accountability might be the "secret ingredient" which will finally make the recipe function effectively.

Other teachers, peers of inadequate instructors, will have a long term interest in either criticizing or eliminating the "weak links."  No tests or awkward justifications will be required to make this "thinning of the herd" possible, either.  The faculty of an average junior high school already know who needs to go.  When bad teachers remain in place, under this approach, everyone else will wind up paying the price in reductions to the annual "graduation pay" part of their compensation.

Think it over. We have to solve this.

To review a few MeanMesa postings on this subject, link to the following:

http://www.meanmesa.com/2009/03/bd87our-next-stink-hole-educational.html
http://www.meanmesa.com/2009/08/surrender-of-critical-thought.html
http://www.meanmesa.com/2010/03/part-one-overview-of-education-reform.html
http://www.meanmesa.com/2010/04/part-two-education-reform-and-economic.html
http://www.meanmesa.com/2010/04/education-reform-part-three-math.html

http://www.meanmesa.com/2010/04/education-reform-reaching-most-troubled.html
http://www.meanmesa.com/2010/04/education-reform-part-four-creating-men.html
http://www.meanmesa.com/2010/04/part-five-education-of-renaissance-man.html
http://www.meanmesa.com/2010/04/part-six-education-reform-and-community.html
http://www.meanmesa.com/2010/10/education-nothing-new-under-sun.html

Part Six - Education Reform and Community Organizing

Smoldering amid all the rubbish orbiting discussions of the present educational calamity, MeanMesa is impressed with one particular feature of the formidable expertise demonstrated by those who might otherwise seem to be most culpable.

Egad!  When the entire landscape is inundated with mediocrity, what "formidable expertise" might that be?

The answer is simple enough.  If, indeed, there is any area where the thing is actually performing, it would be in the ultra-modern, well devised practice of "blaming absolutely anyone else who might have gored the ox."  The teachers in their age old lament, blame the parents.  The parents, as taxpayers, blame the indiscriminate largess of school boards and city councils.  The students, in what might be remarkable frankness, simply state that the thing is so boring as to be essentially "child abuse."

Pretending to be more detached, the preachers blame "creeping Godlessness."  Pundits with ambitious claims for being either incomprehensible or notably "philosophical," assign responsibility to a weakening society.  MeanMesa would like to reserve its own proprietary bit of this flood of blame for the severely "altered" text books vomiting forth from the Texas Board of Education.

Meanwhile, the number of "swords goring the ox" simply grows larger and larger while the topic of the discussion, the educational system, staggers ever more deeply into the dismal realm of an almost complete irrelevance.  There doesn't seem to be much about it which might suggest anything particularly good in its future.

Is MeanMesa careening "off the tracks?"  Again?

Hardly.  Nonetheless, after all this ranting, it may be time for an illuminating allegory.  Hence, ...

Public Education Seen 
As A Soviet Tractor Factory

To frame this comparison, let's take a strictly economic look at US public education.  Hopefully, the more abstract, associated social implications will follow.  We can imagine it as a factory charged with the responsibility of producing  educated graduates who can go forth to constructively participate in the wider economy.

The factory was quite expensive to build.  Its continued operation is also a hefty, recurring expense.  There are the costs for labor, supplies, maintenance, supervision and so on.  Here in America, where we express all commitment and concern for anything as always measured by how many "American dollars" we spend to accomplish it, our "Soviet Tractor Factory" -- that is, our public education system -- is not simply an "elephant in the living room,"  it has become a herd of morbidly obese elephants with a horrible case of herd-wide diarrhea, all still crowded into the living room, all trying to, somehow, remain "under the radar."

Now, under the centralized manufacturing policies of the Old Soviet Union, the Tractor Factory was allowed significant leeway with respect to the quality of tractors it produced.  In fact, Soviet citizens and government alike pretty much grudgingly accepted the idea that a large percentage of the tractors made in the factory would simply never even start, much less ever productively plow a field of potatoes in the Ukraine.

In a similar way, even though we spend vast sums of tax dollars to operate our "public education factories," we have gradually come to accept the idea that only a few more than half of the "tractors" produced there,  that is, only a few more than half of the students educated by the system, will ever become educated enough to graduate from it.  The "non-graduators" will then issue forth to languish in the economic equivalent of the Tractor Factory's "parking lot of defective tractors."

Why would any dynamic, competitive, free market,  innovative American taxpayer -- or parent -- ever accept such an awful production inefficiency?  Would we accept, say, drinking water which was potable only part of the time?  How about electricity service for only half days when no one could know even which half?

Yet, here we are.  Not only are we accepting such failed production on the day this post is written, we suffer the additional burden of literally millions of  "defective tractors" -- that is, semi-literate, uneducated "non-graduators" already churned out by our "out-of-control" educational factories.

Thoughtful education reform energetically applied right now might "bend the curve" on the number of semi-literates we will produce in the future, but it will never rectify the damage our neglect has caused us already.  There are few jobs for these victims of our failed system, certainly even fewer which might pay a living wage.  So, where will they go?  What will they become?  Worse, what will become of them?

As MeanMesa visitors survey the landscape, the sickening reality of the situation is unavoidable.  This is not a challenge which can be met with a tiny bit more enthusiasm in PTA meetings or the replacement of few of the very stinkiest Texas Board of Education textbooks some school administrator purchased from his highly lubricated - $$ - brother-in-law.

Nope.  We Americans are apparently going to have to do a few things we really don't care for very much.  We will have to think our way out of this, and we will have to take some risks that our ideas will work -- even if there are no new, convenient faces available to take the blame should we fail. One of the "risks" which we will have to take has everything to do with our ownership of the system.


As it stands at the present moment, the public education system is an orphan -- it has no mother, no father and no one loves it.  That's right.  No one seems to "love" it enough to actually put "skin in the game" to solve its problems.


"Love" it?  "Skin in the game?"


Yes.  It is becoming distressingly clear that we have long ago decided that public education could be conducted as a mass production scheme.  In fact, not just a mass production scheme, but one with which all of us not directly involved could enjoy not only a quite convenient detachment, but also the rather dubious comfort of assuming that "bitching" about the outcomes satisfied our entire responsibility to rectify the calamity.  Our "wet dream" concerning this "skin in the game" issue was to amount to no more than pouring tax dollars into the monster and then complaining about the mediocre outcomes.


The astonishing -- and depressing -- aspect of this is that we all secretly knew that this hands-off, "orphan" approach would, sooner or later, inevitably lead up  to precisely the mess that we have now.


Easy, easy.  MeanMesa would like to offer a possible solution to this dangerous state of affairs.

Community Ownership 
of Public Education

Now, right off the bat, we must differentiate between the extremely detached, highly convenient and utterly ineffective idea of the "high speed PTA" approach and one which might actually work.  Many of us have suffered through the nearly endless lectures in PTA meetings.  We have, also, wondered about the possible utility of a quick, five minute session where we shook hands with little Tommy's teacher, asked a few vacuous questions about the boy's progress and, pretending to have been both involved and relieved, returned home for our favorite television shows.


That is not the nature of the community organizing MeanMesa is proposing here.  That approach has shown itself as utterly insufficient.  Further, there doesn't seem to be anything about such an approach which, even when embraced even more passionately, might significantly have changed the dismal outcomes.


So, how about this plan.  


In the elementary school a couple of blocks away from MeanMesa's Galactic Headquarters there are roughly four hundred students.  (For our visitors outside the US, these would be younger students in what we call here Kindergarten through the Sixth Grade.)  Some central objectives of this phase of public education is to teach the young ones to read and write, do some fundamental arithmetic and receive a "bit of this and that" information in some other fields such as history, civics and simple science.


Remember, somewhere between being in Kindergarten and being a Senior, finishing High School, half of these little darlings will decide to simply drop out.  Clearly it is not "rocket science" to conclude that such awful prospects have   their beginning right there in this elementary school.


If four hundred students derive from, say, one hundred fifty parents, and 20% of those one hundred fifty parents are actually prepared to take action, we might presume that about thirty adults might possibly be interested in forming up to "own" that particular school.  These thirty parents, organized in this way, could formalize their association as a cooperative.  Each one's membership in this cooperative would entail volunteering a number of hours each week to an effort to improve the school's performance.


What could such a group of directly involved adult parents actually accomplish?


Probably very many things, but let's consider a few possibilities.


1. These adults would be available to be physically present during school days.  If there are discipline problems in the classrooms, the playground or after school, a parent from this cooperative might accompany a student home for a discussion with the child's parents.


2. Some members of the cooperative might man a phone-in "hot spot" tutoring shop where students might call in the evening for help with homework.  This would offer informal assistance on an "as-needed" basis without all the moving parts of a formal tutoring schedule.

In MeanMesa's neighborhood, this would probably include some serious "second language" problems.


3. The active members of the cooperative would submit to a back ground check which would exclude extra creepy elements of the community from access to the young ones.


4. Truancy matters, presently handled by a ponderous civil scheme of police, family courts and probation officers, might be handled -- at least at the very first signs of trouble -- by a "friendly" visit, not by the authorities, but by a concerned neighbor.


5. The cooperative could preview text book choices.  The parents in this neighborhood are far more interested in sons and daughters who can read and write than they are in pregnant, 13 year old ninnies who have been taught that the Earth is 6,000 years old.


6.  The cooperative could advocate for the school in their neighborhood when legislative matters were to be decided.  Everything from teacher tenure to State House allocations to fix the roof, buy supplies and so on.

7.  The "rules" which would control the cooperative would be established by the adults involved.  We will either trust the taxpayers and parents who provide the resources for this school, its administrators, its teachers and it experts or not.  Of course there will be false starts, vendettas, unworkable ambitions and routine bumbling on the part of these parents, but the cooperative can correct such difficulties as it goes along on its mission.


8.  However, perhaps most important of all, cooperative members could pay attention to day to day educational quality.  At their meetings their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the scholastic performance of their neighborhood school would be a public matter.  These thirty parents would be aware about whether or not their students were getting the education they needed or simply being groomed to become drug addled drop outs.

The students might also notice that the community was watching.


Of course, at this point, the "nay sayers" will jump into the fray with their cynical expectation that parents simply don't care enough to make such a commitment.  MeanMesa doesn't think this will be the case at all.  MeanMesa thinks that there is a solid block of parents who will prove quite willing to commit four or six hours a week to support such an important part of our culture.


In fact, MeanMesa suspects that a few successful examples of this kind of community organizing and involvement might spread like wildfire into every school neighborhood in the country.

Hey.  If you are a parent or even just someone who is interested in helping out your community, start "talking it up" a little over the backyard fence.  Realize that an organization such as the one described here will not "spring to life" overnight, but also realize that it will never spring to life if it doesn't start somewhere!

Thanks for joining MeanMesa in this discussion of education reform.

Part Five - Education of the Renaissance Man

MeanMesa has watched in morbid fascination as, during the last five decades or so, the most fundamental "goal" of education has gradually migrated, that is, migrated in a fashion which heralds very little promise for an enduring good.

To clarify such a complaint, we can look at the ultimate "aim" implied in our consideration of the benefits of being, well, educated.  In the more classical sense, we see the process as one directed at the development of an individual made possible by the introduction of all sorts of educational information.  In the more troubling, contemporary sense, we see the process as one primarily directed at developing what an individual might be able to do after being educated.

This latter model can offer some compelling attraction to students "suffering" through a long list of required course work in order to get a degree and, more importantly, become successfully competitive with respect to earning a good wage.  However, the same model introduces some unsettling -- and too often, unexamined -- other conclusions which degrade its objective value in subtle ways.

When viewed from this perspective, a "good" education prepares a student to perform some task in society.  That task may require an "educational information background" which is highly complex, that is, a background which requires a great deal of course work as one prepares oneself to competently perform it.  Examples might include a design engineer working for some military aircraft corporation, a brain surgeon, an attorney, or the like.

Unhappily, even when such a student is quite successful in one of these complex "professional" undertakings, his epitaph will almost always begin with some sort of praise about what he "did" in his life.  "He was a brilliant engineer who was central in the development of the X44 system."  "He was an accomplished attorney who spearheaded legal battle to pass the Retroactive Inversion Appraisal Law."

What might be missing in this epitaph is something more than a  few passing "niceties" concerning his life time accomplishments as a vibrant, creative human being.  Undeniably, the X44 Project and the Inversion Appraisal Law were possibly very material contributions to society, but our likely view of their centrality in reflections on a life is suspect.  

We may be establishing -- and accepting -- such accomplishments while neglecting what are more fundamental aspects of successful living.  To put it bluntly, our recently departed may have been a Renaissance man, but we insist on focusing primarily on what he has done for us.  This toxic outlook manifests itself in the mistakes we have made concerning exactly "what is important" in our educational system.  Such a reconsideration of what have been promoted as its highest values reveals a significant contradiction.

Thanks to the idea that really "good" education will be compensated by money, the features of such a really "good" education have been incorrectly reduced to abilities which can make money.  When a university desires to "toot its own horn" about what a good education it provides, the metric becomes one where the salaries and material successes of its graduates compare favorably with other schools.

Our value structure seems to absolutely exclude any other means of evaluating the essential quality of educations as we compare them.  Further, this is not the result of consistently chosing to evaluate various educations this way -- it is the result of having no alternative of evaluating them any other way.  A good education proves its value and validity by resulting in good salaries.

Could there be something missing here?  Something so fundamental that the general adoption of this bad habit at the exclusion of other, more objective schemes of comparing outcomes of educations, has led us down a "rosy path" to a place where being well educated has come to actually mean the wrong thing?

This conclusion might go a long way in explaining the imponderables we encounter as we consider what changes educational reform might need to take.

Ooops.  A Modified World View

Just to present the paradox in concrete terms, let's simplify the dichotomy to a couple of opposing "one liners." 

On one side we find the Renaissance Man.  He has been educated broadly with the goal of developing into as much of a fully informed human as possible.  This will mean that, during his student career, he has been free to pursue most of the topics which were of the greatest interest to him.  In this case, we have to stipulate that many of these fascinating courses will provide little direct advantage to the likelihood of his post-educational salary being greater.

Further, we can offer a bit of a reassuring caveat here, also.  This wide open curriculum he has sought out during his education is not one based on which classes would require the least effort on his part.  Instead, his scholastic records would reflect a profile of his varied personal interests.  Otherwise, his post-education prospects would be a contest decided by the the artificial interests he might have been coerced to adopt by some university's graduation requirements.


The quality of the future life of a Renaissance Man will be based on the nature of his curiosity and interests.  The quality of the alternative where the man marches "lock step" through predetermined "interests" specified externally to him will be based on the nature of that "external influence."  Renaissance Men are willing to bet on their individual selves.  Lesser men are only willing to bet on the administrators of their schools.

He would view his selection as one which reflected material he considered necessary for his development into, well, what he wanted to develop into.  He would have studied topics which he considered to be an essential for his understanding of everything he was intent upon understanding.

Right away we can see the criticism of such a system.  First, when educated in this fashion, he might not make a large salary.  Second, if such an education does not lead him to "comparative educational successes," there will be no one to blame.  He will be responsible for the consequences of "holding true" to his own, individual interests, but encountering those consequences will not be a metric to judge the education he has accomplished so much as a metric to evaluate the future value of  his interests.

There also, at this point, looms the widely held, social misconception that his education should have transformed him into something, that is, something carefully codifed by those who have authorized themselves to define what he should have been interested in all along.  In fact, these voices will lament the prospect of his becoming, thanks to this individually selected education, more vibrantly what he wanted to be as opposed to what they thought he should be.

Egad.  What a disaster.  What might have been a finely honed expert at something or other has turned out to be a well rounded individual who has accomplished an education directed by his personal interests -- his essence.  How can society expect to run its factories or its armies with educational products like that?

On the other hand, we see the successfully educated technocrat.  Now, MeanMesa does not use that term derisively.  Such educational products can be explicitly vindicated.  A graduate educated in this fashion has studied every sort of detail known about successfully performing some complicated necessity of modern, pragmatic economic technology.

However, quite beyond the negative implications of pursing educational topics defined by someone else -- even when they have been shown to produce very dependable, desirable competitive results with respect to economic measurement -- the social model will characterize this sort of highly defined effort as being a "good" education.  The idea is that exclusively this educational product will fill the needs of a complex economy.

Not much thought is reserved for the inner man sitting at that desk in the law firm, brokerage or engineering office.  Will he be destined to extract the satisfaction for his path of development from the suit and tie, his community standing and his pay check.

Should all that remain somehow mysteriously unsatisfying for him as he considers his life, he can always become an "active church member" or some other superficial nonsense.

The descent of one's being, when neglected long enough, becomes utterly miserable, not to mention sordidly irreparable.  A vibrant, productive culture is not populated strictly by the clever or the well trained.  Sooner or later, we will conclude that it will be squarely measured by how many of its participants are happy and satisfied.

An Even Larger World View

We can see education directed to providing the complex services required for a society as one which, well, serves it.  In such a model, the whole culture is streaming along just "over there," and anyone who seeks an education directed to serving it is intimately defined by its externality.

There may well be small innovations which will enhance the flow of this external stream, but they will be increments designed with the ambition of stabilizing, expanding or accelerating its flow.  Soon enough, the successful in such a culture are successful because they can add to that external flow, not because they  direct it in a way which is consistent with their developed being.

In no time, we see the "Captains of Our Culture" becoming its servants, and, by the way, generally not very well adapted servants, either.  The value of self-growth is discharged as a possible educational product in favor of feeding the flow of the established culture.  The established flow of matters will decide which lives have value -- they will be the lives which have in some way enhanced the flow of the culture not individually satisfying lives which have completed and fulfilled themselves.

For a while, this may seem to be a very rational approach to the assignment of educational priorities, but such a system will inevitably atrophy from the vacuum of real being resulting from the failing individuality of those synthetic labors which at first seemed to be so desperately relevant.  Real creativity and vitality will inevitably be crushed as selfish, mal-intentioned "indulgences" of those who would selfishly stray away from the imperious demands of society or economy toward their own essence and being.

Although this is a bit of a "heavy lift" when it comes to redefining the essential priorities of education reform -- Wow! It's so abstract!  What kind of changes are we talking about here! -- accomplishing changes in this distant field may mark the real turning point.  We must insist that part of the reform proposal will redefine the priorities which are quietly insinuated as we judge just exactly what's really important to the future prospects for our country.  

More individualism and confidence -- less desperate obsession with empty success .

More life satisfaction -- less external validation from pay checks.

More vitality and new ideas -- less ponderous, all consuming obsession with the efficiency and dogmatic values of an aging system of status-quo priorities.

MeanMesa is the first to admit that we have our work cut out for us.  That doesn't mean that we should avoid making the fundamental changes we need just because they involve the risk of misdirecting our efforts.

Is American education headed for more of the Dark Ages or a 21st Century Renaissance?

Education Reform: Part Four - Creating Men & Creating Citizens

Our country's infatuation with considering education -- especially when gauging it with respect to its success and failures -- as a measure of its competitiveness in innovation, technology and other economic drivers may have left something very important "out of the equation."  Philosophically, such neglect or omission sounds  a "tone" of its own, albeit perhaps a rather abstract tone.

Sooner or later Americans will arrive again at the inescapable conclusion that although what one can do because he has been educated has an immediate importance, what one will be stands to shape the future of our nation just as profoundly.  

In the short term -- the time span always favored by "bite and grab" neo-cons -- inventions and efficiencies seem to be the whole body of the "life's blood" coursing through the veins of our country and culture.  However, more reasonable folks understand that, while such things are, indeed, important, the future will be a profile of the quality of citizens who live here, vote here and direct American society, that is, a profile of the essence of the American people.

Of course, such a claim must be very cautious not to imply that the essence of Americans will emerge as a quiet, cooperative, orderly almalgam of ideologues marching forward in lock step style uniformity.  That, again, would be suspicious akin to the neo-con approach where every issue is always politics and the only choice for a response is, too often, to simply dig-in one's heels, predict calamity and incite fear of change.

So, from what well will these American citizens spring?

There can be little question that they will, as is the case with all young humans, develop under the influence of a wide variety of encounters.  They will be products of their own childhoods and upbringing.  They will be influenced by the fundamental values of their parents, churches, coaches and pastors.  The events transpiring during those parts of life when they are aware of events transpiring will, unavoidably, influence their outlooks as adults -- as citizens.

The final product, that is, the nature of the citizen who will ultimately reconcile all these disparate experiences, will be an alloy formed from all sorts of things, many of which will present contradictions to other things. Decisions will be made.  Personalities will be formed.  Intuition and suspicion will each enjoy their own place in the mix.  

Now, to the topic.

A dominant influence in the outcome of this maturational journey will arise from the education of this man and this citizen.  (Of course, girls also become women and citizens...)  All those topics and subjects which might have seemed  somewhat irrelevant as a young student gazed from a classroom window to the fresh air of springtime or considered an upcoming party grow legs -- perhaps better said, grow roots.

In a myriad cacophony of hardly perceivable routes, the fundamental education a student receives will contribute to the foundation of his adulthood.  The underpinnings which will define the adult and the citizen are hard to determine as absolute specifics when considering what thoughts and knowledge lay at the base of his ideas at any given moment, but they are there.

Should anyone wish to dispute such an argument, just let him begin to extract the educational contributions from one of his complex thoughts.  An opinion on the Afghan War might hold particles of a past study of Alexander the Great.  An interest in agricultural subsidies might rely on a recollection of the agricultural beginning of the ancient Sumerian Empires.  A position on some piece of current legislation winding its way through the Congress might be derived from studying the Jim Crow period or accounts of labor disputes from the past.

There is not -- nor should there be -- a "knee jerk path" from some classroom topic encountered in one's youth to some feature of one's adulthood -- and citizenship.  Whether that class was sex education or civics, home economics or psychology, geology or mathematics, every moment spent in a public education classroom is an investment which will determine the quality of the citizen who will be formed by it.

Does anyone think that we, as a nation and a culture, can sustain our collective essence with uneducated, supercilious ninnies?  

An education system which focuses only on what commercial abilities might be inculcated into the youth of our country is sterile and suffocating, not to mention insufferably boring.  Further, this complaint of being "boring" not only fits well in respect to what occurs in the classrooms where this is the primary direction, but also in the citizens such a system will create as it staggers forward.

America has always needed dynamic, well-rounded, interested, interesting, well educated citizens, not simply better prepared "wage slaves," uninformed ideologues who vote as they are told or mindless soldiers who are unable to understand why they are asked to fight.

Just now, as the nation is rightfully flabbergasted at the pitiable state of our public education system's products, we see the crisis of 18 year old Junior High students who read as if they were third graders.  Of course, recoiling from such a realization, we a worried about what the future might hold as these  texting video game players begin to compete with the 300,000 Chinese engineers who graduate every year.

The shock of such a revelation naturally inspires us to a desperate "catch up" mentality, and it probably should.  However, fixing the outrageous defects in what we see today is one thing.  Building a tomorrow which is filled with individuals who have taken a bit of effort to form themselves in some significant way is, unhappily, quite another thing.

It is necessary to understand that we face two challenges.  The first is to educate the young ones for their future competitive, economic survival in a world where our public education system is plummeting to horrible depths of mediocrity and crushing incompetence.  The second, although a bit more abstract but equally critical, is to inspire our nation's students to develop their being to a much high quality, an undertaking which can never succeed in the absence of education.

MeanMesa's compliments to the President for his efforts to reform education.

Stay tuned for even more MeanMesa postings of education reform.

 

Education Reform - Reaching the Most Troubled Students

MeanMesa watched as the News Hour broadcast an education article from New Orleans.  Now, New Orleans already had a terribly ineffective public school system even before Katrina hit.  However, during the hurricane and the flooding, a number of New Orleans schools were utterly destroyed, casting the entire city's public school system into a pit.  The situation had suddenly plunged from "bad to worse."

With the final withdrawal of the autocracy and its cronies from the Capitol and the end of the looting frenzy where not a single dime could get through the Republican Congress, Federal aid money finally began to reach the New Orleans public system.  A fire brand of a school administrator was hired, bad teachers were fired, the communities began to get involved and the system caught a glimpse of the "light of a new day."

Still, the depressing results of the previous years of "good ol'e boy Southern neglect" remain at full throttle.  A short quote from the News Hour presentation:

JOHN MERROW: When school superintendent Paul Vallas arrived in New Orleans three years ago, he faced a tough challenge: how to educate students who are way behind academically or who have gotten in trouble with the law.

This school, Booker T. Washington, was designed for teenagers who are performing at an elementary school level. Although three-fourths of students in Vallas' district are at least one grade level behind, here, the problem is extreme.

PAUL VALLAS, superintendent, Louisiana Recovery School District: I have got 16-year-old seventh-graders and 17-year-old eighth-graders and 18-year-old ninth-graders who are reading at the third- or fourth-grade reading level. Those are -- those are tremendous challenges.

JOHN MERROW: Students who have been expelled or run into trouble with the law attend Success at Schwarz Academy, with the goal of improving their behavior and returning to regular high school.

PAUL VALLAS: We have students who have violated the zero-tolerance policy, who -- who pose a physical danger to other students, kids who are too violent and too disruptive to be kept in the traditional school environment.

JOHN MERROW: From day one, discipline at both schools became the main concern.

Mera Bercy, who is assistant principal at Booker T. Washington:

MERA BERCY, Assistant Principal, Booker T. Washington: Our students, they are frustrated. They are emotionally frustrated. They are academically frustrated. They're not aware of how they're creating a domino effect or how it may affect the entire classroom.

You can watch the entire video and read a transcript of the interview here.

Now, MeanMesa could post an entire book here and still not cover all the efforts the "experts" have been implementing to improve this situation.  Even with some new, rather dynamic thinkers, a plan which implements some of  the latest theories and, finally, enough money resources, the ship seems to keep sinking.  Perhaps the descent is a little slower, but, frankly, most of the players who have committed to move the thing this far are surprised with how stubborn the problems seem to be.

All sorts of sophisticated programs have begun in the school system, but this particular "elephant in the living room" has -- at least so far -- not moved much.

MeanMesa would like to offer a suggestion which might help a little.  It also enjoys the additional advantages of not costing very much and not requiring a lot of time to get started.

Such a suggestion should have a catchy title, so let's call it "Videos From the Common Lives."  Here's how it would work.

It seems pretty clear that a central issue with the students discussed in that quoted interview circles around the state of their dreams and their expectations for their future lives.  When everything happening around you in High School seems to have almost nothing to do with deciding whether you will prosper or suffer after graduation, the whole affair seems to be equivalent to an artificially imposed "tooth ache."  There is little evidence in the lives of these students that a good education will have a measurable effect of their lives after high school.

Instead of dreaming about having a nice place to live, a good job and a family, these young people have been fed an almost overwhelming river of rich drug dealers, professional athlete millionaires and hip hop musicians with giant pinkie rings.  Many of them don't even know anyone with a steady job who lives on a pay check wage.

Most of them also realize that, even though they dream of these examples of prosperity, their odds aren't good.  Having or not having an education isn't even on the table.

To break this suffocating cycle, "Videos From the Common Lives" would work to exhibit some very real possibilities for them.  Videos would be a series of interviews with real people who answer the questions about themselves and their lives which might interest these students the most.  The Videos could also contain some questions about the precise future possibilities which might represent the most frightening aspects of life after high school for these students.

What sort of questions?

"Hi.  My name is Jimmy Lewis.  I am 28 years old.  I live in Duluth, Minnesota with my wife and my daughter.  I work in a small plant which electroplates car parts for Ford Motor Company.  We live in this apartment that you see behind me.  I usually make around $2100 a month and the rent here is $720.  Most of the rest we spend on food and bills."

"I went to high school here, but I didn't quite make it to graduation.  I roamed around town for a couple of years and managed to pick up a possession conviction.  I spent two months in county.  I also figured out that wasn't a good place for me and that I didn't want to go back."

"My probation officer set me up to get a GED and helped me get this job.  That was three years ago, and things have been getting a lot better since then.  I've picked up a few classes at the Junior College which help with work."

"Before I got into trouble, I didn't know that people like me could actually live like this.  I mean, the whole idea of living like this was pretty far away from what was going on all around me while I was growing up."

Okay, maybe this is enough from a sample video to get the message across.  The whole project would encompass perhaps hundreds of such video interviews.  As many representative outcomes as possible would be represented in the whole collection.  They could be shot at all sorts of locations all across the country.

There would be no scripts.  The interviews might generally follow a few questions to guide the conversation, but authenticity and indentification would be the key elements of each one.  The students in New Orleans -- and probably other places, too -- need to see some positive examples of good outcomes for themselves.

There would be no actors.  The "stars" of these videos would be volunteers who were open to the idea of sharing their lives with these students in New Orleans.  MeanMesa supposes that the videos might be subject to a little content editing if the interviews got too far out of hand, but there would be no preaching, no scolding and no condescension.

The volunteers who were being interviewed would not be spectacular successes or failures.  They will  represent the "Common Life."  Each "star" might make a few comments about the reason why he  or she has volunteered to make the film.

The average length of the videos should be around ten minutes, and there should be enough different videos to choose from that a teacher will not have to show the same one more than once.

Give it some thought.  Even if you are not directly involved in the educational process, we -- as a nation -- have to solve this one before it get's even worse.

Education Reform: Part Three - Math, Science and the Future Economy

As educational outcomes slip from poor to worse, the country faces a double threat.  On one side, MeanMesa sees the modern version of those "old fashioned civics classes" purloined by the neo-cons who require an uninformed electorate to continue their scheme to convert the nation to a plutocracy.  One the other hand, we Americans are beginning to realize that our past economic prosperity is now being undercut by the production of "graduates" who should be much better at certain things than they actually are.

What "things?"  Which "graduates?"

 

This post is all about the "tip of the spear" when it comes to the application of our education system's suitability as a foundation for our nation's continued ability to compete.  To plunge directly to the point, MeanMesa will offer up the following conclusion.

The fundamental engine for our continued economic prosperity rests squarely on mathematics and science.

Consider the following diagram which presents an overview of the relation between educational results leading to innovation and invention.  This is a two-tiered challenge.  Recently, the United States has done fairly well in the "innovation" area, but development and manufacturing have consistently moved to overseas economies. This is centrally a result of not having a technology savvy work force ready to move in after the better educated elite innovators have made their technological breakthroughs.

Of course all sorts of other expertise will be required to sustain the day-to-day functions of our culture, but when it comes to the type of innovation and invention which has always served us so well so far, we are slipping to a new, dangerous low point.  Here, we can very comfortably say that  first class doctors, lawyers, stock brokers and bankers and the like are absolutely essential to our modern version of the American dream, but this sort of talent -- when viewed in the cold light of the competition we now face globally -- has much more to do with keeping the country "on the tracks" than with "building the new tracks" our domestic innovators have designed.

And to address the inevitable counter argument, MeanMesa must also happily stipulate that the innovators and discovers at the very "top end" of the American know-how ladder are pretty damned impressive.  These would be the "genius class" of the whole educational spectrum.  It includes the brightest boys and girls from our own country right along with a growing number of also bright boys and girls our corporations are able to import from other places where education is working better than here.

This "top of the ladder" bunch continues to make amazing contributions to the technological base of our nation's economy.

However, MeanMesa sees the trouble brewing in the class just below these "rock stars" of science and math.  To make things work right, the national labor force will require the stars, all right, but just below them it will also require a veritable army of only slightly less notable workers, too -- that is, workers with solid educational backgrounds who, although perhaps not Nobel Prize winning geniuses, are still highly competent technically .

The diminishing membership in this second, less publicized group heralds real trouble for the future of our economy.  Further, the horde of almost illiterate workers now being produced by the failing educational system is rapidly filling this demographic, squeezing what had previously been considered "slightly less accomplished geniuses" upward into critical positions which would have been filled with better candidates before.

As to the question of which graduates are on the receiving end of this dose of MeanMesa frustration, the answer is simple enough.  All of them.

The high school graduates -- at least those who actually graduate -- have been severely "dumbed down" in precisely the areas we are discussing.  The university graduates, in far too many cases, have been able to artfully avoid any serious mathematics and science classes as they rushed through their "required subjects" in order to get "everything" done in time for commencement.

The false hope is that graduates entering these  professional but non-technical labor fields will be able to function quite well without ever soiling themselves with subjects dealing with hard logic and reasoning, you know, stuff like chemistry and physics.  Meanwhile, while the art history and psychology classes are packed, there are plenty of desks open in the calculus classes.

The Impact on the Future Economy

All of this might be very easily dismissed if it were simply another poorly documented case of fear mongering.  However, those of us who are committed to not "hiding from the facts," see this monster oozing out of not exceptionally bad examples of our education system, but rather as oozing out of most parts of it.

The diagram above, generally, traces the lineage of economic prosperity based on creativity within the country.  It is a common and easy mistake to attribute economic progress in matters of invention and innovation only to the last steps in the ladder.  Actually, a far deeper investment in what might be called "technological thinking" is required.

A successful inventor of a new material, for example,  is not successful simply because he has completed the final technology course work directly involved in his invention.  Quietly obscured behind those last, highly directed courses are many others which have focused not so much on the details of this latest innovation, but rather on a broad education about scientific thought, logic and other work which prepared his background for such a success.

The successes which can drive our national economy forward are based on a foundation of other educational work which, when viewed too superficially, might easily appear unnecessary, that is, work which might be painlessly omitted from graduation requirements, for example.  When colleges and universities -- and high schools -- are facing deep budget problems, their administrators may be tempted to take such an action to reduce costs.

When a more complete education track, one which exposes both the foundations and the consequences of each element in a "big picture," is considered, the entire effort becomes critically interrelated and interdependent.  One essential ingredient in educational reform will be adopting the idea that successful educational outcomes have all these unseen foundations.

Part Two: Education Reform and the Economic Crisis

Of course, thanks to a derelict approach to all forms of infra-structure management from bridges to banking regulations, our national "bad habits" now present a long and varied collection of mortal threats to our democracy. Even though this panoply of associated topics seems to roam far and wide, there seems to be a central educational aspect behind every one of them. Sooner or later, we will need to mature enough to see education as the main engine which drives every aspect of our way of life instead of simply as another opportunity to indulge ourselves with selfish, ideological "poker bets."

Obama, very correctly, interprets the primary priorities threatening the country by examining the leaks in the arterial flow of our economy --  both now and in the future. Health care costs, had they continued on the rapacious trend they set for themselves, although already absorbing a full one third of every dollar, would have grown to nine tenths of the GDP if it were allowed to simply continue.

Every one else in the industrialized world has figured out how to do this with both better health outcomes and far better cost efficiency.  The "bought and paid for" Senators, along with their corporate insurance masters, are obsessed with keeping us as uninformed as possible about this.  They wouldn't be trying to do that if they weren't emboldened by how stupid we are.

And, health care is not the only problem our economy faces.

As we move on, there are a frightening number of other "elephants in the living room" starting with the environment and our national energy costs. Those two are presently configured to cast a similar portion of the nation's future wealth into the same old pockets of the modern Robber Barons and their cronies  which we have always filled so willingly -- and painfully -- so far.

Both areas are economic realities where the current system, should it continue unchanged, will gradually redirect such a huge portion of our national economy to the intolerable "cancer stage" capitalists we have been so carefully trained to tolerate already that nothing will be left in surplus for our growth and development. When viewed in the most cynical -- or, possibly more rational -- sense, this was the destructive scheme of the neo-cons under the autocracy.

And, of course, other accounts can be also be added. There is the constant drain of our bloated military budget, a disaster compounded by incredibly poorly managed, outrageously expensive foreign wars.  This relentless extraction of our tax money is also squarely reliant on the educational failure of citizens who remain convinced that modern diplomatic challenges are no more than an extension of WW2, that modern day politicians -- including Obama -- may be castigated as Hitler-like or Stalin-like villains and that overly simplified modern "talking points" are somehow validated by history lessons they never studied.

So, when does the economy finally give up it's last gasp?

Well, for those MeanMesa visitors who are not professional economists, simply start deducting the fractions from the whole. Remove one third of our current $12-14 trillion gross domestic product for health care. Deduct another third for our unrelenting oil import bills. Deduct another fifth or so for our perpetual balance of trade deficit from all the cheap labor imports we consume like hungry junkies dancing on a street corner. Deduct another fifth for the tax resources we pour into a military complex which seems intent on an endless shopping spree to prepare itself for the last war.

Before long, the equation no longer makes sense. The autocracy, along with the previous two Republican governments, has borrowed money from every sucker who would lend to us. This "payday loan" scheme financed Iraq, the Medicare pharmaceutical fraud and two huge, multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for the criminals closest to the autocrat. And those are only the "big ticket items" -- the roads, schools, hospitals and bridges were deteriorating further toward a third world state daily.

Although, even as the "talking heads" were lamenting the largess of the Democrats, even when taxes were increased more than ever before, the nation could still not pay the immense debts these "fiscal conservatives" were racking up.

How in the world would an informed electorate sit, inactive and dumbfounded on their television couches, as this perfidy unfolded in plain sight?  There is an answer.  There is an answer.  Not only are all these "couch potatoes" staggering under a bloated and biased parody of facts, they also suffer from a deafening lack of education -- in this case, high school civics classes.

President Obama could, if he were no more than a field hand, roll up his sleeves and start trying to minimize the individual damage of each of these economic land mines, but that is not his style. He will act in that manner when necessary, but after each of these little "hold the line" emergency fixes he will inexorably return to the fundamental problem which is sabotaging, undermining and complicating a system which should be working much better than this one is.

The Common Fundamental Problem: An Uneducated Electorate

This posting presents this background in the clearest terms MeanMesa can conjure up to explain what President Obama faces here, the obstacles he must over come and his determination to responsibly address the fundamental root problems mentioned above.

MeanMesa, patiently watching the mindless neo-cons destroy the remaining remnant of the Republican Party, cannot avoid certain common themes now revealed in one depressing visage after another. The neo-con view of our economy, staggering after the criminal looting conducted during the autocracy, hosts the unexamined dream of a restoration of the entire "talking duck" just as it was moments before its 2007 violent collapse.

The neo-con dream of national "exceptionalism" pretends that we, as a nation, were neither the horrendously "bad actors" which our history undeniably suggests nor the accounting idiots we would have to be to explain how we are managing our economy in such a reckless fashion. That dream is the neo-con foundation for all manner of complaints, both domestic and world wide.

What emerges is a cynical, neo-con hope that we, as the majority in this country, will continue to be deceived by the propaganda. Should we mature enough to see the history of the US more objectively, the domination of this persuasive, deceptive media elite would collapse almost immediately.

The neo-cons relegate the disasters of the autocracy's poorly designed and poorly disguised military adventures to a convenient, although rancid, mix of bad luck, perfidy and unfairness. When those wavering excuses falter, even for a moment, intractable conspiracies -- heavily seasoned with an unsettling lack of information -- are trotted in to fill the predictable, gaseous "contradictions," the logical conflicts not based on reality but rather, formulated from even worse machinations of their twisted wet dreams.

The point of all this ranting?

This giant, national fraud was possible only in an environment where the public had neither interest in, the background for nor the access to credible information about the facts of what we, as a nation, were doing -- that is, doing both to ourselves and to the other unfortunate, international victims of the creepy neo-con plans to take over. If the voters of the country were to remain sufficiently ill informed and uneducated, these "wanna-be" plutocrats could continue to be free to chase any self-serving dream they wished, lubricated by a literal glacier of broadcast misinformation.

It's the opinion of MeanMesa that all those rambling Southerners in the Senate, all the thinly repainted racists at the Tea Bagger riots and the hordes of semi-literate butchers, plumbers and truck drivers who consistently buy this torrent of drivel actually do reveal a commonality. Each and every one of them either exploits or suffers from an almost sterile absence of factual information as a consequence of an equally troubling absence of education.

Oh sure, they can allegedly read and write, but they have been so thoroughly filled with inflammatory "talking points" that they have long ago lost any personal ambition to demand good information or actually discern the facts before they form their "opinions." How can so many citizens of such a modern, sophisticated country ever sink to such a state?

These information challenged voters have been carefully saturated with the artificial, narcotic insistence that the entire dilemma facing us MUST BE AS SIMPLE AS A BAPTIST SERMON. The near collapse of the country can always be attributed to common villains, suspicious leadership, conveniently rewritten history (thanks largely to the "textbooks" prepared by creationists and other birthers for the Texas Board of Education and disseminated throughout the country's schools), questioned facts and statistics and rigged up public opinion polls "proving" that they are right and that we should be terrified.

This is the unsettling product of the propaganda work crafted by radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity conducting a professional misinformation program -- a program constantly reinforced beyond reason by referral to Congressmen and Senators of the right who have no qualms about spitting out every style of deception and misrepresentation as they speak to the nation, always unchallenged, in what passes for interviews on news broadcasts.

This gross deception has already advanced far too far. The percentage of folks in the country who live and breathe by these lies has become the foundation of a horribly threatening divisiveness which is an immediate, material threat to our democracy. The "icing on the cake" is that all these pig headed ideas are filled with flamboyance so outrageous that, to their benefit, most sensible voters are growing more and more skeptical -- just not skeptical enough to correct the problem.

However, other, equally sinister aspects of this misinformation campaign, perhaps those presented more subtly, have penetrated to a shocking depth in the minds of Americans to become full-fledged and firmly implanted "mistaken certainties." The careful repetition of such terms as "ramming through Congress," "giant entitlement program," "back room deals" and the like now form the axiomatic fundamentals for ideas which should be so easily discarded as to never see the light of day.  Every one of them is easily discharged by a review of the actual facts not to mention even a passing knowledge of Congressional history.

The President has now tossed the education calamity to the front, for some, a comforting distraction amid the chaos of corruption which has marked his ambitions to reform health care.  For MeanMesa his choice of this priority signifies another, common sense, cool headed decision to correct a central, underlying cause of the problems we face.

What to Expect

No matter what specific approach the President may attempt, the other side will predictably lie in wait.  For instance, twenty-four hours after he makes his plan public, the "bite and grab" Republicans will begin complaining about the money which must be invested, the idea of teaching something other than more abstinence and a 6,000 year old Earth, the idea of more "wrong colored" people graduating with college degrees and the inevitable dirty shirt Southern Senatorial chorus bemoaning the infringement on states' rights -- all nothing more than a tragic demand for the  selfish extension of the status quo which has served them so well.

The prospect of splitting away any ill-gotten neo-con "profits" for a long term investment in education to shore up the future of the country will cause their heads to explode.  We already have far too many fellow citizens who believe that "stupid is all right."  In our gravely weakened state we cannot afford to carry their dead weight into the competition for success in the 21st Century global economy.

The rest of the educated world has always poked fun at the "dumbies" from America.  That was then.  This is now.  As usual, all these foreigners have figured out the game.  From Russia to Brazil, from China to Belgium, they are cranking out legions of sharp, savvy, fully educated and energetic technical, business and policy leaders ready to dominate the vast cadre of American high school drop outs.

It's another case where our far sighted President is attempting to "bend the curve."

Education Reform: A Memorial to a Math Teacher For All Seasons

MeanMesa offers a quick explanation for this intermediate posting in the Education Reform series promised to all the great MeanMesa visitors.

Today, the 31st of March, 2010, marks the passage of a monument of an educator, Jaime Escalante.  Although Mr. Escalante was born and began his teaching career in Bolivia, his impact on a troubled high school in Los Angeles provides the absolutely amazing impact of his teaching career and the precise part which is so important here.

Mr. Escalante's prominence ushers in two distinct points which must be considered as we think over the possibilities of educational reform in our country.

Two Distinct Points Concerning the Teaching of Jaimer Escalante

The first has everything to do with exactly what he did.

For an account of what Mr. Escalante accomplished in Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, MeanMesa happily hands the "heavy lifting" to good old Wikipedia.  The rather abbreviated biography presented there "tells the story" pretty well.  It includes both the actual educational accomplishment for which he is -- and should be -- famous, along with all the mischief he encountered with the bureaucrats who were running his High School.

From Wiki:

Jaime Escalante

a Math Teacher for All Seasons

Jaime Escalante was born in La Paz, Bolivia. While living in Bolivia he taught physics and mathematics for nine years. In 1964 he decided to move to the United States. To prepare, he began studying science and mathematics at University of Puerto Rico. Upon moving from Puerto Rico to California, Escalante could not speak English and had no valid American teaching credentials. He studied at night at Pasadena City College to earn a degree in biology. He took a day job at a computer corporation (Burroughs Corporation), while continuing his schooling at night to earn a mathematics degree at California State University, Los Angeles where he studied calculus.

In 1974 he began teaching at Garfield High School, East Los Angeles. Escalante was initially so disheartened by the lack of preparation of his students that he called his former employer and asked for his old job back. Escalante eventually changed his mind about returning to work when he found 12 students willing to take an algebra class.

Shortly after Escalante came to Garfield High, its reputation had sunk so low that its accreditation was threatened. Instead of gearing classes to poorly performing students, Escalante offered AP (advanced placement) calculus. He had already earned the criticism of an administrator who disapproved of his requiring the students to answer a homework question before being allowed into the classroom. "He told me to just get them inside," Escalante reported, "but I said, there is no teaching, no learning going on".

Determined to change the status quo, Escalante had to persuade the first few students who would listen to him that they could control their futures with the right education. He promised them that the jobs would be in engineering, electronics and computers but they would have to learn math to succeed. He said to his students "I'll teach you math and that's your language. With that you're going to make it. You're going to college and sit in the first row, not the back, because you're going to know more than anybody".

The school administration opposed Escalante frequently during his first few years. He was threatened with dismissal by an assistant principal because he was coming in too early, leaving too late, and failing to get administrative permission to raise funds to pay for his students' Advanced Placement tests. This opposition changed with arrival of a new principal, Henry Gradillas. Aside from allowing Escalante to stay as a math teacher, Gradillas overhauled the academic curriculum at Garfield, reducing the number of basic math classes and requiring those taking basic math to concurrently take algebra. He denied extracurricular activities to students who failed to maintain a C average and new students who failed basic skill tests.

Escalante continued to teach at Garfield, but it was not until 1979 that Escalante would instruct his first calculus class. He hoped that it could provide the leverage to improve lower-level math courses. To this end, Escalante recruited fellow teacher Ben Jimenez and taught calculus to five students, two of whom passed the A.P. calculus test. The following year, the class size increased to nine students, seven of whom passed the A.P. calculus test. By 1981, the class had increased to 15 students, 14 of whom passed.

Escalante placed a high priority on pressuring his students to pass their math classes, particularly advanced calculus. He rejected the common practice of ranking students from first to last and instead frequently told his students to press themselves as hard as possible in their assignments.

In 1982, Escalante came into the national spotlight when 18 of his students passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam. The Educational Testing Service found these scores to be suspicious, because all of the students made the exact same math error on problem #6, and also used the same unusual variable names. Fourteen of those who passed were asked to take the exam again. Twelve of the 14 agreed to retake the test and did well enough to have their scores reinstated. In 1983, the number of students enrolling and passing the A.P. calculus test more than doubled. That year 33 students took the exam and 30 passed. That year Escalante also started teaching calculus at East Los Angeles College.

By 1987, 73 students passed the A.P. calculus AB exam and another 12 passed the BC version of the test. This was the peak for the calculus program. The same year Gradillas went on sabbatical to finish his doctorate with hopes that he could be reinstated as principal at Garfield or a similar school with similar programs upon his return.

1988 saw the release of a book Escalante: The Best Teacher in America by Jay Mathews (ISBN 0-8050-1195-1) and a movie Stand and Deliver detailing the events of 1982. During this time teachers and other interested observers asked to sit in on his classes. Escalante received visits from political leaders and celebrities, including then-President Ronald Reagan and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

For the whole Wiki story about Jaime Escalante

The second has everything to do with why he was able to do it.

As to why Mr. Escalante was able to pull off such a feat, the further details will be provided based on another one of those famous MeanMesa opinions.  This is important to mention here.  Yes, of course, the results of Mr. Escalante's efforts represent an example of what is existentially possible as we consider reforms to our education system nationwide.  However, perhaps even more important is an inquiry into his ability to do such an unexpected thing.

After all, the President's ambitions seem to have everything to do with reproducing such great results all across the country.  To ever realize that goal, we had better have a thorough understanding of what all was involved in this remarkable example which seems to elude all the excuses and other constraints which are now stacked "sky high" as the explanation for our current national educational calamity.

Why was he able to do such a thing -- the very thing which is presented as a theoretical impossibility by our educational experts?

"Theoretically" there was every possible reason for Mr. Escalante to produce a "just barely" acceptable outcome with his Garfield High School class of misfits, minorities and under achievers.  Worse, this "theoretical" problem went further.  "Theoretically," if his class had done as well as most such classes, there would be no serious problem for everyone involved -- the school principal, the parents, the students and the tax paying community -- to be quite satisfied with such a "just barely" educational outcome.

See, there was an inertia of expectation flooding all across Mr. Escalante's efforts.  Garfield High School already had a well established -- and, apparently, well deserved -- reputation for being, even generously, wretchedly mediocre.  Mr. Escalante's teaching credentials certainly suggested nothing out of the ordinary for teachers hired at Garfield.  The "theoretical" learning capacity of his students was already well established as so distressingly marginal that no one particularly expected them to graduate, let alone learn calculus.

Those of us who frequent MeanMesa are sickeningly familiar with such low expectations.  High schools in Albuquerque, MeanMesa's Galactic Headquarters, graduate only fifty percent of the students who should graduate.  In addition to that dismal reality, New Mexico pours half of its state budget into education every year.

Naturally, the education establishment here, it turns out, is completely prepared to either completely disregard the 50% disaster or explain it away with volumes of sophisticated reasons why such an outcome is Acceptable.  Unavoidable.  Explainable.  Irreversible.  You know, big complicated reasons that every day, "out of the system" taxpayers could never understand.

Hey.  These people are experts.  That means that they know -- as their own absolute certainty -- everything that is impossible.  That's why they get the "big bucks."  Right?

The citizens in the PTA meeting would be met with frightening, hysterical, raucous laughter if they were to so much as mention anything about calculus.

What's the message?

Somewhere in the Escalante story, among the processes, the bureaucracy, the students and the outcome, there is a sinister disconnection between what the statistics -- the "theoreticals" -- predicted and what actually happened.  In fact, given all the parameters of the process which occurred in Garfield High School, the statistical and the theoretical outcome was so unlikely as to be essentially impossible.

This story "hits home" here in New Mexico as unavoidably as the proverbial "fart in a spacesuit."  For the experts, all the "theoreticals and statistics" for the Albuquerque educational catastrophe are presented as completely sufficient to explain away every criticism a parent or tax payer might issue as he watches his child/student descend into a glacial ennui of disgust and disinterest.  Such an educational disaster is not a spectacular exception.

It now consumes fully one half of all public education students in Albuquerque High Schools.

Mr. Escalante was not teaching a in a theoretically effective way to a class which, according to statistics was theoretically able to learn calculus.  He clearly never slipped behind such cover.  He obviously did not throw his "best effort" at some risk averse theoretical teaching teaching system designed to minimize failures and optimize whatever was left in hopes of achieving "acceptable" and "anticipated" results.

No.

For Mr. Escalante, it was far more personal than that.

Mr. Escalante abandoned the theory and replaced it with the fire that was in him to teach.  It didn't matter to him that he had a crappy job in a crappy school.  He took the chance.  He could either teach these unlikely students calculus or he would fail utterly -- with  "all flags flying."  He wasn't searching out any expert excuses for getting rotten results.  He didn't care about excuses -- he cared about teaching.

A Final, Disturbing Overview

Just how remarkable was Mr. Escalante's success?  What can it tell us about the educational nightmare that challenges the President?

Well, to get a firm grip on the matter, we will have to "step back" far enough to gather a little perspective.  Because MeanMesa is never shy about bold, big picture models of things which have too many "fish hooks" when examined in smaller pictures,  let's just take this tack.

Let's consider the students who comprise that 50% drop out group.  A couple of decades before they were drifting away from the prospect of learning, they were infants, crawling around, exploring everything they could reach or see!  Those babies were -- just as Mr. Escalante was "on fire" to teach -- on fire with curiosity.  They wanted to learn and absorb every tiny detail of the reality around them, and they were pursuing that aim without so much as a single thought of the risks involved.

Every parent has watched this process in utter amazement during their child's infancy.

What happened?  How have these immensely curious young humans managed to become so discouragingly uninterested that they are willing to simply walk away from their totally free public educations?

We're way past lurching around looking for scape goats or trying some painless tweaking to repair this monstrosity.

Please stay tuned to MeanMesa as we try to unfold the rest of the education reform stories in this series of postings.

MeanMesa's compliments to President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan.