When Illinois enacted new education reform through Senate Bill 7 in June 2011, Arne Duncan praised the passage of the legislation by saying, "While some states are engaging in noisy and unproductive battles around education reform, Illinois is showing what can happen when adults work through their differences together. Illinois has created a powerful framework to strengthen the teaching profession and advance student learning in Illinois." I argue that, contrary to Secretary Duncan's assertion, the legislation has merely replaced noisy and unproductive battles with quiet and subversive battles. The legislation enacted a whole slew of "reforms" that made the state eligible for Race to the Top funding. The most touted components of the bill are authorization for a longer school day for Chicago schools, making it more difficult to obtain tenure, making it easier to revoke tenure and making it more difficult to strike. There was also companion legislation passed prior to Senate Bill 7 that changed the teacher evaluation system to include standardized criteria for classroom observations and student test performance.
It is ironic that in this new era of cooperation among adults in Illinois, there have been more teacher strikes in the first year of implementation than in any other times in the recent past. In fact it had been over two decades since the previous teacher strike in the Chicago Public Schools. This time around, over 90% of the teachers in Chicago voted to strike which was well over the new threshold of 75% set by Senate Bill 7. Given the poor working conditions and relatively lower pay for Chicago teachers, you might think that it makes sense that teachers in Chicago would strike over being asked to work 25% more time for a 2% raise in pay. The progress and outcomes of the Chicago strike were tracked in much of the national media.
Less well known outside of the Chicago area was the first ever teacher strike in Lake Forest, where the average teacher pay is over $100,000 per year. In addition, there have been strikes in three other Chicago suburbs, Highland Park, Prairie Grove, and Evergreen Park, with varying levels of teacher pay. There were strike notices, but no strikes yet, in three other districts with unresolved contracts. Five strikes out of eight strike notices is an unusually high percentage. There were varying issues in play within each school district, but one theme that cut across all the districts is, ostensibly, dissatisfaction with the pay raise offered by each district.
However, I think there is a more fundamental reason why there is an outbreak in teacher's anger over pay. Teachers have suffered through layoffs and pay freezes for over four years. For the most part teachers have been patient with school districts and have understood that economic conditions require everyone to tighten their belts. But SB 7 has changed everything. Even though Secretary Duncan argues that it is a model of cooperation, in reality it reminds me of President Reagan's oxymoronic relationship with Russia around nuclear arms: "Trust, but verify"
Reagan no more trusted the Russians than SB 7 trusts anyone in education. In one fell swoop every IL administrator's authority to evaluate was summarily revoked in June 2012. All administrators had to participate in roughly 40 hours of retraining on how to evaluate with the new system. The reformers believed it was essential to throw the entire education system in IL into chaos to ensure that those districts that have over 90% of their students meeting the standards do a better job of determining whether their teachers are adequately performing. In addition, for those schools where 90% of the students are failing to meet the standards, the reformers felt that principals needed a solid evaluation system that would allow them to accelerate the granting of tenure to high performing teachers or to dismiss unsatisfactory tenured teachers, if the schools ever reached a critical mass of tenured teachers, instead of constantly have to scramble to fill new positions.
Just as Reagan used his "Trust, but verify" mantra as subterfuge to dismantle the Russian military in the Cold War, reformers are using the mantra of accountability as a quiet and subversive battle to dismantle the teacher union even though there is no discernible evidence that their reforms will have any impact on the lives of children. In fact, it is easy to see that the reformers "have no clothes" when you look beyond the rhetoric and realize that this complicated evaluation system fundamentally relies on data that does not exist for many teachers. There are no state assessments in IL for any areas of social studies, most areas of science, art, music, kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, 9th grade, 10th grade, and 12th grade.
Another sign of the non-data-drivenness of data-driven reformers is the absolute dismissal of the data establishing the fundamental importance of trust and collective responsibility in sustaining long term growth in student learning. The "trust, but verify" teacher evaluation assault on the teaching profession destroys the very trust and collective responsibility that is the foundation for true reform in our schools. There is no doubt that we need to rethink our human resource management of schools, but we need forward thinking not rehashing of ideas that are even considered out dated by many in the corporate world. Next time I will elaborate on the tectonic shift in thinking about how employees are valued in today's successful corporations.
Friday, November 09, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
The Boy Scouts vs Ralph Waldo Emerson
The motto of the boy scouts is "Be prepared." Legend has it that when Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the boy scouts, was asked, "Be prepared for what?", he responded, "Be prepared for anything." I think Baden-Powell's view of the boy scouts sums up modern education. The boy scouts program aspires to prepare boys with life skills and values of good citizenship. To advance within the boy scouts, each participant needs to accumulate merit badges to among other things demonstrate that they can navigate without a compass, serve as a cook during a campout, and transport someone who might be trapped in a smoke-filled room. By completing the required merit badges before the age of 18 and being an active member of a troop for a specified period of time, boys are prepared to move on to the next level and eventually become an eagle scout, which is the pinnacle of a boy's scouting career.
Likewise, the motto, "Be prepared for anything," rightly characterizes modern education. You never know when you will need to solve a quadratic equation, explain the function of the endoplasmic reticulum, or describe the origin of a word. No matter how long you stay in school if you don't collect your quadratic equation badge, endoplasmic reticulum badge, your word origin badge, and all of the other required badges, you don't get to move on to the next level and eventually become a Boston College eagle, Bridgewater eagle, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University eagle or any other form of college animal.
The boy scouts and modern education are also parallel in their lack of relevance to urban youth. In recent years, the national boy scouts organization has tried to expand participation among urban youth. It is a difficult challenge to help urban youth see the importance of learning to make camp gadgets out of rope. As a consequence, less than 11% of boy scouts are low income urban youth. Likewise, only around 11% of students at competitive colleges are low income youth. While a preparation for anything benefits the vast majority of society, there are far too many children in our society for whom a preparation for anything is actually a preparation for nothing.
In contrast to a preparation focused on everyone achieving roughly the same set of standards or merit badges, Ralph Waldo Emerson focuses on individual greatness as an essential component of a productive society. A key metaphor for Emerson's notion of greatness comes from a lecture given by professor Michael Faraday in 1848. Faraday explained the concept of diamagnetism, namely that each substance has its own unique polarity. Whereas, the polarity of iron tends to run from north to south, the polarity of other substances have their own unique direction. Likewise, Emerson believes that "every mind has a new compass, a new north, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind."
Emerson goes on to say, "A point of education that I can never too much insist upon is this tenet that every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or less variation from any other man's. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it; learns to be at home with himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and insights that come to him, and to have the entire assurance of his own mind." In other words, school standardization is the antithesis of greatness.
It is unfortunate that at the dawn of public education in the United States around the middle part of the nineteenth century, the winning educational design that has stood the test of time over a century and a half is one that is predicated on a common set of basic standards that all educated children must possess before they can pursue greatness in college. Quite the contrary, the implication of Emerson's philosophy is that we should as quickly as possible let students pursue greatness. It is through specialization that students will learn the academic standards in a relevant manner. I would further speculate that a significant underlying basis for the income disparities in learning outcomes is not that higher income families can better support students in the pursuit of the standards, but rather that higher income families can use their financial resources to help their children pursue greatness with a specialized education that schools cannot provide.
The myth of the 20th century civil rights movement is that equalizing the education system for all would bring about equality. I think Emerson would have foreseen the abject failure of trying to create a system that is the same for everyone. Today's civil rights movement should abandon the pursuit of mediocrity through standardization and instead should focus on transforming our education system into one that uniquely supports all students in the pursuit of greatness.
Likewise, the motto, "Be prepared for anything," rightly characterizes modern education. You never know when you will need to solve a quadratic equation, explain the function of the endoplasmic reticulum, or describe the origin of a word. No matter how long you stay in school if you don't collect your quadratic equation badge, endoplasmic reticulum badge, your word origin badge, and all of the other required badges, you don't get to move on to the next level and eventually become a Boston College eagle, Bridgewater eagle, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University eagle or any other form of college animal.
The boy scouts and modern education are also parallel in their lack of relevance to urban youth. In recent years, the national boy scouts organization has tried to expand participation among urban youth. It is a difficult challenge to help urban youth see the importance of learning to make camp gadgets out of rope. As a consequence, less than 11% of boy scouts are low income urban youth. Likewise, only around 11% of students at competitive colleges are low income youth. While a preparation for anything benefits the vast majority of society, there are far too many children in our society for whom a preparation for anything is actually a preparation for nothing.
In contrast to a preparation focused on everyone achieving roughly the same set of standards or merit badges, Ralph Waldo Emerson focuses on individual greatness as an essential component of a productive society. A key metaphor for Emerson's notion of greatness comes from a lecture given by professor Michael Faraday in 1848. Faraday explained the concept of diamagnetism, namely that each substance has its own unique polarity. Whereas, the polarity of iron tends to run from north to south, the polarity of other substances have their own unique direction. Likewise, Emerson believes that "every mind has a new compass, a new north, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind."
Emerson goes on to say, "A point of education that I can never too much insist upon is this tenet that every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or less variation from any other man's. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it; learns to be at home with himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and insights that come to him, and to have the entire assurance of his own mind." In other words, school standardization is the antithesis of greatness.
It is unfortunate that at the dawn of public education in the United States around the middle part of the nineteenth century, the winning educational design that has stood the test of time over a century and a half is one that is predicated on a common set of basic standards that all educated children must possess before they can pursue greatness in college. Quite the contrary, the implication of Emerson's philosophy is that we should as quickly as possible let students pursue greatness. It is through specialization that students will learn the academic standards in a relevant manner. I would further speculate that a significant underlying basis for the income disparities in learning outcomes is not that higher income families can better support students in the pursuit of the standards, but rather that higher income families can use their financial resources to help their children pursue greatness with a specialized education that schools cannot provide.
The myth of the 20th century civil rights movement is that equalizing the education system for all would bring about equality. I think Emerson would have foreseen the abject failure of trying to create a system that is the same for everyone. Today's civil rights movement should abandon the pursuit of mediocrity through standardization and instead should focus on transforming our education system into one that uniquely supports all students in the pursuit of greatness.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
What the Olympics Can Teach Us About Education
The London 2012 Olympics have been over for two weeks and I am sill experiencing withdrawal symptoms. The Olympics pack the adrenalin rush of an entire sports season into a 2-week period. There are so many amazing stories of incredible athletes, from newcomers to experienced athletes.
One of the first U. S. gold medalists was Kim Rhodes for skeet shooting. She practices 7 days per week at a cost of $700/day in ammunition. Her thousands of hours of practice paid off in an Olympic record of 99 hits out of 100 moving targets. She also set a record by winning a medal in five straight Olympics.
Brendan Hansen had retired from swimming after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He started competing in triathlons to stay in shape. As a triathlete, his love of swimming was rekindled. He decided to make a comeback for the 2012 London Olympics. Although he only achieved a bronze medal in his signature 100 m breaststroke event, Hanson reported that he had worked the hardest for this bronze medal and it was his most treasured accomplishment.
In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps established a new standard by winning more medals in one Olympic game than any other athlete. He accomplished what everyone hoped and expected he would, which created intense pressure. At the London games, Phelps was poised to shatter the lifetime record for the number of Olympic medals. However, this time around, the Olympics was much more fun for Phelps. After all that he has accomplished at the Olympic level, Phelps' enjoyment is seeing how much more he can accomplish: ''Now it's just a matter of how many toppings I want on my sundae.''
In track and field, the women's 100 m hurdles was an exciting race. Five women ran faster than the winning time from the Beijing Olympics. One of the finalists, Canadian Phylicia George, didn't start running track until she was in the 10th grade. Although she started her career relatively late, she made the Canadian team and ran her personal best in the finals. She did not make the medal stand, but is poised to return for the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.
The advertisers picked up on the Olympic spirit. Proctor and Gamble paid tribute to the mothers of Olympic athletes. They showed moms cheering for their young children and then cheering them as Olympians. Kelloggs highlights that Olympic sports are the same for both young and old. And, right after Rebecca Soni broke the 2:20 mark and set a new world record in the 200 m breaststroke, AT&T showed a teenage swimmer seeing that vision of success and setting her mark to beat the world record some day.
Reflecting on all of these stories and more, I have extracted seven principles that schools can learn from the Olympic games. These principles provide a stark contrast to the standards-based college readiness movement.
1. Schools should make it easy for children to participate in authentic experiences. Most people enter a sport through a simpler form of the game that retains the key features. The Olympic sport of soccer is one of the most popular sports in the world precisely because children can make soccer balls and goals out of almost anything, such as old rags for a ball and garbage cans for soccer goals. Children start gymnastics with foam balance beams that rest on the floor and specialized high bars that are lower and have thinner bars for kids to grip. In the realm of science, 1st graders can repeat Newton's gravity experiments with fresh eyes using a book and paper as the objects.
2. Schools should focus on and promote what is fun about academic subjects. Children will continue to participate in sports to the extent that they have fun. Landon Donovan is one of the elite members of the U.S. men's soccer team. What initially drew him to soccer was the enjoyment of the game and the camaraderie. The American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO), the nation's largest recreational soccer association, explicitly has fun as one of its philosophical underpinnings. Donovan continued to play AYSO soccer for the fun of it, even after he started playing on competitive teams. Likewise, children pursue academic subjects outside of school to the extent that they find the subject fun.
3. Since children develop at different rates, schools should support students beginning a subject at different ages. It is possible to start playing many sports at any age. My father-in-law first took up skiing at the age of 70 and skied actively for several years. Christian Okoye was a Nigerian-born track and field star, who attended Azusa Pacific University. He won seven NCAA titles in shotput, discus, and hammer throw. When his native country of Nigeria failed to select him for the 1984 Olympic team, Okoye started playing college football. He went on to become an all star running back for the Kansas City Chiefs. Julia Child was also a college athlete. Her height gave her an advantage in golf, tennis, and basketball. She majored in English and worked as a copyeditor. During World War II, she worked as a top secret researcher in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA. She married a fellow OSS specialist and moved with him to France after the war. At the age of 36, Child abandoned her training and went to the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. She is still one of the most well known chefs throughout the world.
4. Since there are so many areas in which students can become experts, schools should refrain from requiring expertise on an extremely narrow set of subjects. The United States Olympic team won gold medals in fifteen different sports as wide ranging as archery and shooting to wrestling, judo, and boxing to swimming, track and field, and cycling to a wide range of team sports. It is impossible to discern some meaningful set of skills that underlie all of these sports, yet winners of these disparate sports all earn the same honor of being an Olympic gold medalist. Likewise, the adult world has a wide range of areas in which students can develop expertise, but do not share any meaningful underlying set of common skills. By narrowly defining "college readiness" we limit our country's success in the same way that the United States would win fewer gold medals if we required every Olympic athlete to be an expert triathlete.
5. Schools should provide students with visions of success that can drive interest in a variety of a fields. After the U. S. women's gymnastic team won the team gold medal, Bob Costas interviewed the team members on NBC's prime time show. He asked the gymnasts when they had first dreamt of winning the Olympics. Each member of the team said the moment came for them while watching the triumph of either the 1996 U. S women's team on DVD or the 2004 U. S. women's team live. In their book, Becoming Adult, Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider present evidence that students learn about careers from their family in elementary school, from schools in middle school, and from the community in high school. Visions of success are scarce in low income families and communities. Schools should be a place that provide students with visions of success.
6. Only when students develop the desire should schools encourage practice for the sake of development. Coaches don't usually introduce athletes to a sport through intense drill and practice. Potential athletes are introduced to a sport by playing the game. Those that want to improve their skills are now motivated to engage in the monotony of drill and practice since it serves a greater purpose of interest to them. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contends that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to develop expertise in any endeavor. He argues that the success of charter school networks like KIPP is based on getting students to spend more time in school. However, it is crucial to understand the motivation for students to spend 10,000 hours in practice. The exceptional people outlined in Outliers were not driven to practice by a desire to get to the next stage in life, but rather they were driven by a deep desire to master their craft. Fostering deep desire as a precursor to practice is absent from any school reform discussions.
7. Accountability in schools should be tied to outcomes of importance, not simple indicators of important outcomes From the beginning of playing a sport, children can distinguish success from failure. The person or team with the most points or the lowest time is the winner. Having great speed, strength, leaping ability, etc. only matters when it translates into more points or lower times. Spain's national soccer team is known for ball possession. They usually have the ball for significantly more time than their opponents. However, focusing on ball possession as an end unto itself would be detrimental to the ultimate objective of scoring more goals than their opponents. Likewise, rather than making intermediate indicators ends unto themselves, schools need to focus on the actual outcomes that matter for success or failure in each field of study.
Defining success in school based on a narrow set of indicators is extremely detrimental to the success of our country. The primary college readiness indicators perpetuate significant income gaps in school performance that reinforce an endless cycle of intergenerational poverty. May the Olympics inspire our policy makers to envision a new model of education that values the diversity of successful avenues in life and inspires unique greatness in every student.
One of the first U. S. gold medalists was Kim Rhodes for skeet shooting. She practices 7 days per week at a cost of $700/day in ammunition. Her thousands of hours of practice paid off in an Olympic record of 99 hits out of 100 moving targets. She also set a record by winning a medal in five straight Olympics.
Brendan Hansen had retired from swimming after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He started competing in triathlons to stay in shape. As a triathlete, his love of swimming was rekindled. He decided to make a comeback for the 2012 London Olympics. Although he only achieved a bronze medal in his signature 100 m breaststroke event, Hanson reported that he had worked the hardest for this bronze medal and it was his most treasured accomplishment.
In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps established a new standard by winning more medals in one Olympic game than any other athlete. He accomplished what everyone hoped and expected he would, which created intense pressure. At the London games, Phelps was poised to shatter the lifetime record for the number of Olympic medals. However, this time around, the Olympics was much more fun for Phelps. After all that he has accomplished at the Olympic level, Phelps' enjoyment is seeing how much more he can accomplish: ''Now it's just a matter of how many toppings I want on my sundae.''
In track and field, the women's 100 m hurdles was an exciting race. Five women ran faster than the winning time from the Beijing Olympics. One of the finalists, Canadian Phylicia George, didn't start running track until she was in the 10th grade. Although she started her career relatively late, she made the Canadian team and ran her personal best in the finals. She did not make the medal stand, but is poised to return for the 2016 Olympics in Brazil.
The advertisers picked up on the Olympic spirit. Proctor and Gamble paid tribute to the mothers of Olympic athletes. They showed moms cheering for their young children and then cheering them as Olympians. Kelloggs highlights that Olympic sports are the same for both young and old. And, right after Rebecca Soni broke the 2:20 mark and set a new world record in the 200 m breaststroke, AT&T showed a teenage swimmer seeing that vision of success and setting her mark to beat the world record some day.
Reflecting on all of these stories and more, I have extracted seven principles that schools can learn from the Olympic games. These principles provide a stark contrast to the standards-based college readiness movement.
1. Schools should make it easy for children to participate in authentic experiences. Most people enter a sport through a simpler form of the game that retains the key features. The Olympic sport of soccer is one of the most popular sports in the world precisely because children can make soccer balls and goals out of almost anything, such as old rags for a ball and garbage cans for soccer goals. Children start gymnastics with foam balance beams that rest on the floor and specialized high bars that are lower and have thinner bars for kids to grip. In the realm of science, 1st graders can repeat Newton's gravity experiments with fresh eyes using a book and paper as the objects.
2. Schools should focus on and promote what is fun about academic subjects. Children will continue to participate in sports to the extent that they have fun. Landon Donovan is one of the elite members of the U.S. men's soccer team. What initially drew him to soccer was the enjoyment of the game and the camaraderie. The American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO), the nation's largest recreational soccer association, explicitly has fun as one of its philosophical underpinnings. Donovan continued to play AYSO soccer for the fun of it, even after he started playing on competitive teams. Likewise, children pursue academic subjects outside of school to the extent that they find the subject fun.
3. Since children develop at different rates, schools should support students beginning a subject at different ages. It is possible to start playing many sports at any age. My father-in-law first took up skiing at the age of 70 and skied actively for several years. Christian Okoye was a Nigerian-born track and field star, who attended Azusa Pacific University. He won seven NCAA titles in shotput, discus, and hammer throw. When his native country of Nigeria failed to select him for the 1984 Olympic team, Okoye started playing college football. He went on to become an all star running back for the Kansas City Chiefs. Julia Child was also a college athlete. Her height gave her an advantage in golf, tennis, and basketball. She majored in English and worked as a copyeditor. During World War II, she worked as a top secret researcher in the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA. She married a fellow OSS specialist and moved with him to France after the war. At the age of 36, Child abandoned her training and went to the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. She is still one of the most well known chefs throughout the world.
4. Since there are so many areas in which students can become experts, schools should refrain from requiring expertise on an extremely narrow set of subjects. The United States Olympic team won gold medals in fifteen different sports as wide ranging as archery and shooting to wrestling, judo, and boxing to swimming, track and field, and cycling to a wide range of team sports. It is impossible to discern some meaningful set of skills that underlie all of these sports, yet winners of these disparate sports all earn the same honor of being an Olympic gold medalist. Likewise, the adult world has a wide range of areas in which students can develop expertise, but do not share any meaningful underlying set of common skills. By narrowly defining "college readiness" we limit our country's success in the same way that the United States would win fewer gold medals if we required every Olympic athlete to be an expert triathlete.
5. Schools should provide students with visions of success that can drive interest in a variety of a fields. After the U. S. women's gymnastic team won the team gold medal, Bob Costas interviewed the team members on NBC's prime time show. He asked the gymnasts when they had first dreamt of winning the Olympics. Each member of the team said the moment came for them while watching the triumph of either the 1996 U. S women's team on DVD or the 2004 U. S. women's team live. In their book, Becoming Adult, Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider present evidence that students learn about careers from their family in elementary school, from schools in middle school, and from the community in high school. Visions of success are scarce in low income families and communities. Schools should be a place that provide students with visions of success.
6. Only when students develop the desire should schools encourage practice for the sake of development. Coaches don't usually introduce athletes to a sport through intense drill and practice. Potential athletes are introduced to a sport by playing the game. Those that want to improve their skills are now motivated to engage in the monotony of drill and practice since it serves a greater purpose of interest to them. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contends that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to develop expertise in any endeavor. He argues that the success of charter school networks like KIPP is based on getting students to spend more time in school. However, it is crucial to understand the motivation for students to spend 10,000 hours in practice. The exceptional people outlined in Outliers were not driven to practice by a desire to get to the next stage in life, but rather they were driven by a deep desire to master their craft. Fostering deep desire as a precursor to practice is absent from any school reform discussions.
7. Accountability in schools should be tied to outcomes of importance, not simple indicators of important outcomes From the beginning of playing a sport, children can distinguish success from failure. The person or team with the most points or the lowest time is the winner. Having great speed, strength, leaping ability, etc. only matters when it translates into more points or lower times. Spain's national soccer team is known for ball possession. They usually have the ball for significantly more time than their opponents. However, focusing on ball possession as an end unto itself would be detrimental to the ultimate objective of scoring more goals than their opponents. Likewise, rather than making intermediate indicators ends unto themselves, schools need to focus on the actual outcomes that matter for success or failure in each field of study.
Defining success in school based on a narrow set of indicators is extremely detrimental to the success of our country. The primary college readiness indicators perpetuate significant income gaps in school performance that reinforce an endless cycle of intergenerational poverty. May the Olympics inspire our policy makers to envision a new model of education that values the diversity of successful avenues in life and inspires unique greatness in every student.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Olympic Readiness Standards
The 2012 London Olympic games open this week. The Olympics is a celebration of international sporting competition featuring over 10,000 athletes from 205 countries competing in 302 events across 26 Olympic sports. These athletes are at the top of their game and in great physical condition. They stand in stark contrast to the average couch potato who will spend several hours each day watching the events. This couch potato culture has led to over one-third of U.S. adults being labeled obese as defined by the U.S. Center of Disease Control.
The problem of adult obesity begins in childhood. Almost one in five children are considered obese in America. This rate represents a three-fold increase since the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics. Even though the number of athletes and countries involved in the Olympics has doubled in the last three decades, the rate of athleticism in the U.S. has significantly declined.
The CDC has identified the low quality of physical education programs in U.S. schools as a significant contributor to this childhood obesity problem. Current physical education standards lack sufficient rigor. They merely set expectations that students lead active lives when they leave school. We need to address the problem of childhood obesity through more rigorous physical education standards. What's needed is an Olympics-for-all movement. While it is not possible for every athlete to compete in the Olympics, it is important for us to create Olympic readiness standards, so that all students leave our education system prepared to lead lives at the highest levels of physical fitness.
In order to manage the Olympic readiness standards at scale, we need to focus on a small set of sports that are predictive of performance in the 26 Olympic sports. The triathlon seems like the most viable option to serve as the core of the Olympic readiness standards. It is actually three sports in one: swimming, cycling, and distance running. It is one of the most grueling competition formats. The pinnacle event is the Ironman competition in which simply finishing the race grants the finisher the title of Ironman. As an elite sport in itself, the triathlon provides a great preparation for the Olympics, yet it is extremely approachable as there are triathlon events in every community.
A major challenge in addressing the Olympic readiness standards is that the triathlete community is fairly homogeneous. Almost 90% of U.S. triathletes are Caucasian and the average annual household income is $126,000. This homogeneity is also present in the individual sports that make up the triathlon. Almost 80% of college distance runners and around 85% of college swimmers are Caucasian. In order to equalize the playing field for everyone, we will need a significant capital investment in our schools to ensure that every school has a regulation swimming pool and high quality road bicycles. Arrangements need to be made with local communities to find safe routes for all students to engage in long distance training. It is also important that we provide incentives for mostly Caucasian, upper class triathletes to move into poor, minority neighborhoods to provide triathlon training, if only for two years.
The list of issues could go on, but let's pause here before your eyes glaze over with $ signs. If you have reached this point in the essay and you are thinking-"Wow, Olympic readiness standards would be a great idea!"- I have failed to adequately portray the ridiculousness of this idea. While many schools in poor neighborhoods are in great need of infrastructure investment, Olympic readiness standards would be a terrible justification. The Olympic readiness standards are, of course, a parody of the standards-based movement.
Just as the triathlon would serve as the core of the Olympic readiness standards for all 26 Olympic sports, the standards-based movement has selected math puzzles and word games as the core of the college readiness standards for the 45 fields of undergraduate study tracked by the U.S. Department of Education's annual digest of education statistics. Although the triathlon is a great indicator of overall athletic ability, it fails as an adequate predictor of specific sports that distantly share the same underlying skills as the triathlon. Likewise, math puzzles and word games are a great indicator of overall academic ability, but they fail as adequate predictors of specific undergraduate fields of study that emphasize different sets of academic abilities.
As you watch the Olympic games over the next few weeks, think about how impoverished our games would become if we focused on a narrow set of skills as prerequisite for entrance to the games. It will serve as a reminder of how impoverished our universities and our society are by focusing on such a narrow set of skills as the gatekeeper to social mobility.
Next, month I will share my experiences of watching the games and reflect on how the Olympics could serve as a model for a new more inclusive set of college readiness standards.
The problem of adult obesity begins in childhood. Almost one in five children are considered obese in America. This rate represents a three-fold increase since the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Olympics. Even though the number of athletes and countries involved in the Olympics has doubled in the last three decades, the rate of athleticism in the U.S. has significantly declined.
The CDC has identified the low quality of physical education programs in U.S. schools as a significant contributor to this childhood obesity problem. Current physical education standards lack sufficient rigor. They merely set expectations that students lead active lives when they leave school. We need to address the problem of childhood obesity through more rigorous physical education standards. What's needed is an Olympics-for-all movement. While it is not possible for every athlete to compete in the Olympics, it is important for us to create Olympic readiness standards, so that all students leave our education system prepared to lead lives at the highest levels of physical fitness.
In order to manage the Olympic readiness standards at scale, we need to focus on a small set of sports that are predictive of performance in the 26 Olympic sports. The triathlon seems like the most viable option to serve as the core of the Olympic readiness standards. It is actually three sports in one: swimming, cycling, and distance running. It is one of the most grueling competition formats. The pinnacle event is the Ironman competition in which simply finishing the race grants the finisher the title of Ironman. As an elite sport in itself, the triathlon provides a great preparation for the Olympics, yet it is extremely approachable as there are triathlon events in every community.
A major challenge in addressing the Olympic readiness standards is that the triathlete community is fairly homogeneous. Almost 90% of U.S. triathletes are Caucasian and the average annual household income is $126,000. This homogeneity is also present in the individual sports that make up the triathlon. Almost 80% of college distance runners and around 85% of college swimmers are Caucasian. In order to equalize the playing field for everyone, we will need a significant capital investment in our schools to ensure that every school has a regulation swimming pool and high quality road bicycles. Arrangements need to be made with local communities to find safe routes for all students to engage in long distance training. It is also important that we provide incentives for mostly Caucasian, upper class triathletes to move into poor, minority neighborhoods to provide triathlon training, if only for two years.
The list of issues could go on, but let's pause here before your eyes glaze over with $ signs. If you have reached this point in the essay and you are thinking-"Wow, Olympic readiness standards would be a great idea!"- I have failed to adequately portray the ridiculousness of this idea. While many schools in poor neighborhoods are in great need of infrastructure investment, Olympic readiness standards would be a terrible justification. The Olympic readiness standards are, of course, a parody of the standards-based movement.
Just as the triathlon would serve as the core of the Olympic readiness standards for all 26 Olympic sports, the standards-based movement has selected math puzzles and word games as the core of the college readiness standards for the 45 fields of undergraduate study tracked by the U.S. Department of Education's annual digest of education statistics. Although the triathlon is a great indicator of overall athletic ability, it fails as an adequate predictor of specific sports that distantly share the same underlying skills as the triathlon. Likewise, math puzzles and word games are a great indicator of overall academic ability, but they fail as adequate predictors of specific undergraduate fields of study that emphasize different sets of academic abilities.
As you watch the Olympic games over the next few weeks, think about how impoverished our games would become if we focused on a narrow set of skills as prerequisite for entrance to the games. It will serve as a reminder of how impoverished our universities and our society are by focusing on such a narrow set of skills as the gatekeeper to social mobility.
Next, month I will share my experiences of watching the games and reflect on how the Olympics could serve as a model for a new more inclusive set of college readiness standards.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Root Canal Reform
One morning earlier this month, I woke up with a severe tooth ache. I could not understand why this was happening, since my dentist has always told me that I take good care of my teeth. Upon visiting the endodontist, I found out there was a crack in my tooth that was imperceptible to x-rays. Bacteria was able to enter through the crack and kill the nerves. At that point the root became a festering cauldron. The only solution was to drill into the tooth, extract the festering material along with the dead nerves, fill the void with benign material, and cap the tooth. The tooth is now dead on the inside, but remains functional.
If you have ever experienced uncontrollable pain, you know that your mind wanders in strange places. Once the endodontist had performed his magic, it dawned on me that a root canal is an apt metaphor for current standards-based reform efforts using Race to the Top funding. Our poorest schools are suffering. The standards-based storyline for this suffering is that there a too many low quality teachers in our poorest schools. Many of the new teacher evaluation systems required for Race to the Top funding are designed to root out festering teachers. By extracting the festering teachers or even closing down whole schools with too many festering teachers, the argument is that performance will improve.
However, lacking in these discussions is any robust plan for replacing all of the festering teachers. Our poorest schools have the most difficult time filling vacancies. Just like a root canal, the plan seems to be that nothing is better than something. By filling the void with inert material and capping it with zero tolerance discipline, we can end up with functional schools that are completely dead on the inside.
What root canal reform ignores is all of the evidence indicating that it is the team that matters more than the individual. More than a decade ago, Hank Becker found that teachers could perform above their abilities if surrounded by good teachers. Researchers in Australia have found that high performing teacher teams have a strong process of enculturating new team members and building collective responsibility. Researchers at the Consortium on Chicago School Research have found that strong teacher teams, built on a foundation of trust, are a powerful tool for improving student performance. Instead, root canal reform fosters mistrust, which destroys teams.
An alternative to root canal reform focused on individual teachers could be reform by the Lenovo stat, which is the NBA's tool for measuring the power of teamwork. Shaquille O'Neal is among the most dominant centers in the NBA, yet during the 2006 NBA finals, the Lenovo stats show that surrounded by the wrong teammates, his squad performed worse than any other combination of players. It is not the quality of the individual players that matters, but the quality of the combination of players that makes the biggest difference. Applying these principles to education recognizes that teaching is a team effort and that districts need to think very carefully how they compose teams before they lay all the blame on individuals.
If you have ever experienced uncontrollable pain, you know that your mind wanders in strange places. Once the endodontist had performed his magic, it dawned on me that a root canal is an apt metaphor for current standards-based reform efforts using Race to the Top funding. Our poorest schools are suffering. The standards-based storyline for this suffering is that there a too many low quality teachers in our poorest schools. Many of the new teacher evaluation systems required for Race to the Top funding are designed to root out festering teachers. By extracting the festering teachers or even closing down whole schools with too many festering teachers, the argument is that performance will improve.
However, lacking in these discussions is any robust plan for replacing all of the festering teachers. Our poorest schools have the most difficult time filling vacancies. Just like a root canal, the plan seems to be that nothing is better than something. By filling the void with inert material and capping it with zero tolerance discipline, we can end up with functional schools that are completely dead on the inside.
What root canal reform ignores is all of the evidence indicating that it is the team that matters more than the individual. More than a decade ago, Hank Becker found that teachers could perform above their abilities if surrounded by good teachers. Researchers in Australia have found that high performing teacher teams have a strong process of enculturating new team members and building collective responsibility. Researchers at the Consortium on Chicago School Research have found that strong teacher teams, built on a foundation of trust, are a powerful tool for improving student performance. Instead, root canal reform fosters mistrust, which destroys teams.
An alternative to root canal reform focused on individual teachers could be reform by the Lenovo stat, which is the NBA's tool for measuring the power of teamwork. Shaquille O'Neal is among the most dominant centers in the NBA, yet during the 2006 NBA finals, the Lenovo stats show that surrounded by the wrong teammates, his squad performed worse than any other combination of players. It is not the quality of the individual players that matters, but the quality of the combination of players that makes the biggest difference. Applying these principles to education recognizes that teaching is a team effort and that districts need to think very carefully how they compose teams before they lay all the blame on individuals.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Pickett's Charge and the Carnage of Standards-based Reform
Many consider Pickett's Charge to be the fulcrum of the civil war. For most of the war, Lee's Confederate army successfully played defense against the Union army. However, when Lee shifted from defense to offense it changed the tide of the war. The offensive campaign came to a head at Gettysburg, where the Union army had gained a superior defensive position. At the culmination of the battle, Lee ordered a frontal assault into the heart of the Union defenses. Even though Pickett's brigade was only able to reach the outermost Union defenses, he still lost over half of his troops. After three days of battle, Gettysburg resulted in the greatest carnage of any Civil War battle and the Confederate army suffered the brunt of those casualties. Lee's army never recovered from the loss.
Ries and Trout have taken the lessons of military strategy and applied them to corporate marketing. They chronicle a myriad of companies that repeat Lee's mistake of launching a frontal assault against a well defended opponent. The end result is corporate carnage. Companies that hold an inferior position in the marketplace should not launch a frontal attack against a well defended opponent. Instead, they should choose their battles lines carefully so as to gain the tactical advantage at the point of attack.
This same metaphorical military lesson can be applied to college readiness. As with other competitive situations, military strategy can be used to characterize the competition involved in college admissions. Just like General Lee, school systems continue to launch students from underprivileged families headlong into battle against students enjoying a superior defensive position. The battlefields are the standardized tests that both systematically favor students from wealthy families and systematically label underprivileged schools and students as subpar (Duncan & Brooks-Dunn). Is it any wonder that the carnage among our nation's "dropout factories" rivals that of Pickett's Charge?
For many people, it makes intuitive sense to insist that underperforming schools work harder, work smarter, or face closure. And after 10 years of No Child Left Behind and almost 30 years since a Nation at Risk, students from underprivileged families have indeed significantly improved their academic outcomes. Despite these improvements, underprivileged students still have lost ground on college entrance rates to wealthier students. Wealthy students are now four times more likely to attend a competitive college than poor students; whereas, forty years ago wealthy students were only two times more likely to attend a competitive school than poor students (Bastedo & Jaquette, Table 3). In battle, those in a superior defensive position grow stronger over time, and those engaged in frontal assault grow weaker.
Ries and Trout offer a ray of hope for people who are outmatched on the battlefield: change the battlefield by outflanking your opponent. They describe how Apple Computer did just that to IBM with the Macintosh computer in 1984. Apple invented a new market for graphical personal computers, which took rivals years to replicate. However, Apple fumbled its lead and was near death in the mid 1990s. The pursuit is as important as the initial victory. Fortunately, Apple recovered by again changing the battlefields. This time they reinvented the marketplace for music players, cell phones, and tablet computers. They are now one of the world's largest companies.
In the battle for higher education, the state of Texas has also changed the battlefield. Students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class are automatically admitted to the Texas university of their choice, regardless of their test scores. Critics have protested that students from underprivileged schools couldn't possibly compete in the college classroom against their better matched rivals. However, despite the critics, underprivileged students have shown that not only can they outcompete their lower ranked rivals in the classroom, but also in overall graduation rates as well (Niu & Tienda, Figure 3). It seems that being a big fish in a small pond is a better way to prepare for college than being a small fish in a big pond. As an added bonus, students from underprivileged schools are much more likely to major in STEM fields than their lower ranked rivals. Therefore, focusing on class rank not only can increase the diversity of college graduates (Bastedo & Jaquette, Figures 4 & 5), but also seems like a sound strategy for increasing the diversity of STEM fields.
The standardization of the standards-based movement has solidified the homogenization of the population at our nation's competitive colleges as mostly white middle- to upper-income students (Dickerson & Jacobs). The resulting carnage perpetuated on underprivileged black and Hispanic students has made it difficult for them to succeed even in noncompetitive colleges. To achieve the national goal of diversifying the ranks of our college graduates, administrators need to rethink how they can diversify the college admissions process. Relying primarily on tests that favor wealthy students perpetuates the fallacy that those tests are good predictors of college performance. As we have seen, something as simple as shifting the entrance criteria to class rank can have huge effects on diversification, while maintaining or exceeding success rates. I wonder what other high risk-high reward ideas can create opportunities for underprivileged youth to compete from their areas of strength and outflank their wealthier peers for entrance to competitive colleges.
Ries and Trout have taken the lessons of military strategy and applied them to corporate marketing. They chronicle a myriad of companies that repeat Lee's mistake of launching a frontal assault against a well defended opponent. The end result is corporate carnage. Companies that hold an inferior position in the marketplace should not launch a frontal attack against a well defended opponent. Instead, they should choose their battles lines carefully so as to gain the tactical advantage at the point of attack.
This same metaphorical military lesson can be applied to college readiness. As with other competitive situations, military strategy can be used to characterize the competition involved in college admissions. Just like General Lee, school systems continue to launch students from underprivileged families headlong into battle against students enjoying a superior defensive position. The battlefields are the standardized tests that both systematically favor students from wealthy families and systematically label underprivileged schools and students as subpar (Duncan & Brooks-Dunn). Is it any wonder that the carnage among our nation's "dropout factories" rivals that of Pickett's Charge?
For many people, it makes intuitive sense to insist that underperforming schools work harder, work smarter, or face closure. And after 10 years of No Child Left Behind and almost 30 years since a Nation at Risk, students from underprivileged families have indeed significantly improved their academic outcomes. Despite these improvements, underprivileged students still have lost ground on college entrance rates to wealthier students. Wealthy students are now four times more likely to attend a competitive college than poor students; whereas, forty years ago wealthy students were only two times more likely to attend a competitive school than poor students (Bastedo & Jaquette, Table 3). In battle, those in a superior defensive position grow stronger over time, and those engaged in frontal assault grow weaker.
Ries and Trout offer a ray of hope for people who are outmatched on the battlefield: change the battlefield by outflanking your opponent. They describe how Apple Computer did just that to IBM with the Macintosh computer in 1984. Apple invented a new market for graphical personal computers, which took rivals years to replicate. However, Apple fumbled its lead and was near death in the mid 1990s. The pursuit is as important as the initial victory. Fortunately, Apple recovered by again changing the battlefields. This time they reinvented the marketplace for music players, cell phones, and tablet computers. They are now one of the world's largest companies.
In the battle for higher education, the state of Texas has also changed the battlefield. Students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class are automatically admitted to the Texas university of their choice, regardless of their test scores. Critics have protested that students from underprivileged schools couldn't possibly compete in the college classroom against their better matched rivals. However, despite the critics, underprivileged students have shown that not only can they outcompete their lower ranked rivals in the classroom, but also in overall graduation rates as well (Niu & Tienda, Figure 3). It seems that being a big fish in a small pond is a better way to prepare for college than being a small fish in a big pond. As an added bonus, students from underprivileged schools are much more likely to major in STEM fields than their lower ranked rivals. Therefore, focusing on class rank not only can increase the diversity of college graduates (Bastedo & Jaquette, Figures 4 & 5), but also seems like a sound strategy for increasing the diversity of STEM fields.
The standardization of the standards-based movement has solidified the homogenization of the population at our nation's competitive colleges as mostly white middle- to upper-income students (Dickerson & Jacobs). The resulting carnage perpetuated on underprivileged black and Hispanic students has made it difficult for them to succeed even in noncompetitive colleges. To achieve the national goal of diversifying the ranks of our college graduates, administrators need to rethink how they can diversify the college admissions process. Relying primarily on tests that favor wealthy students perpetuates the fallacy that those tests are good predictors of college performance. As we have seen, something as simple as shifting the entrance criteria to class rank can have huge effects on diversification, while maintaining or exceeding success rates. I wonder what other high risk-high reward ideas can create opportunities for underprivileged youth to compete from their areas of strength and outflank their wealthier peers for entrance to competitive colleges.
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