Category Archives: Education Policy

How Our Great Education Institution Was Created

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How do we rebuild what has been so badly damaged?

Start with Public Understanding & Presidential Leadership

“Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”  George Washington, Farewell Address

And Abraham Lincoln demonstrated presidential leadership in signing the Morrill Act. It promoted “the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in several pursuits and professions of life.” This set the foundation for the land-grant college system, our agricultural experiment stations, and extension (diffusion) of practical research-based information.

How do we grow a nation?

How do we grow a nation?

 

Lincoln’s belief: “The legitimate object of government is ‘to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves’.”

Look Closely at the History of American Education as the Country Moved Forward

A hundred years later, lawmakers recognized the need to maintain the integrity of educational research by using public institutions of higher learning. The educational visionaries of the time wrote the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act. And John F. Kennedy clearly expressed the role of the federal government.

“A century of experience with land-grant colleges has demonstrated that Federal financial participation can assist educational progress and growth without Federal control.”

Regional educational laboratories were developed for the basic research and development of practical solutions to the issues facing schools. They would serve as a the bedrock of excellence promoting use of best practices ( Theory of Action). The information provided was then to be disseminated (diffused) to the schools. But a network to freely disseminate information and assist in training at the local level was never fully realized.

Despite Setbacks Excellent Ideas Were Repeatedly Recognized

And time marched on. The Reagan administration pointed to the Cooperative Extension System as an example of America’s can do spirit. Ronald Reagan recognized that…

“Despite the obstacles and difficulties that inhibit the pursuit of superior educational attainment, we are confident, with history as our guide, that we can meet our goal. The American educational system has responded to previous challenges with remarkable success. In the 19th century our land-grant colleges and universities provided the research and training that developed our Nation’s natural resources and the rich agricultural bounty of the American farm.”

How we make progress is up to us.

How we make progress is up to us.

Using the right foundational building blocks, an institution for the diffusion of knowledge can be built to last.

(This is the last of a ten blog series on The Road to Educational Quality and Equality that began with The March Begins.)

The Crossroads of Opportunity

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The modern-day march towards equality has always been — at least partially — about public education.

When educational inequality was studied by James S. Coleman, they used tools —surveys and tests— to determine outcomes. And those that saw equal educational opportunity being established in high-minority and high-poverty schools looked further into the means by which educational quality was being improved.

Since researcher Ronald Edmonds and others made their observations known, no one has been able to definitively dispute them. The correlates for effective schools have been expanded; they have been rewritten and renamed; they have been reorganized and re-researched — and they stand as guiding principles.

Edmonds had followed in the footsteps of the leaders of the community school movement. Father of the concept, Frank Manley, drove the idea as far as he could and handed it over to Frank (Francis) Keppel who wrote the essence of it into law as best he could.

Jefferson's express of the need to educate the common people.

Jefferson’s express of the need to educate the common people.

Now, we stand at a crossroads in education law. What principle will we stand upon in order to do right by the children of this country? Will we side with what has proven itself effective, or go with what so many desperately want to make “work”? Will we repeat mistakes of the past only to discover it leaves children behind? Or will we travel the hard but proven path of equal opportunity?

Does a rising tide lift all boats?

It is only when you stand on the shoulders of giants that you can see what they saw. Understanding the concepts of standards, testing, community education, and the personal and shared responsibility of educating a nation of children is the ladder that can take us high enough to see the best way.

The opportunity we have now is to use the law —the reauthorization of ESEA currently called No Child Left Behind— to put in place the foundational principles of equal educational opportunity, the principles of effective schools.

Part 9 of ten blogs on The Road to Educational Quality and Equality that started with The March Begins.

What Do YOU Mean “Standards”?

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Our modern-day standards movement can roughly be marked by the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983. And “standards” crept into federal law under George H. W. Bush with the help of Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ratvich who promoted the use of “academic” standards.

We use descriptors of every kind when we talk of standards: academic, performance, process, content, curricular, core, opportunity-to-learn, and always “higher.”

But let’s talk about how to use standards. As Charles M. Reigeluth explained in “To Standardize or to Customize Learning?”—“If not properly conceived, standards can do far more harm than good….They can be used as tools for standardization—to make all students alike. Or they can be used as tools for customization—to help meet individual students’ needs”

We can look at it this way: There is no standard way to drive; there are rules, there are guidelines, but when it comes to getting behind the wheel, it’s an individual thing with decisions made based on variables. Reigeluth provided this —“To use a travel analogy, standards for manufacturing are comparable to a single destination for all travelers to reach, whereas standards for education are more like milestones on many never-ending journeys whereby different travelers may go to many different places.”

Who chooses the road for our young travelers?

Who chooses the road for our young travelers?

As long as we offer all of our education traveler’s quality opportunities along the way, we have fulfilled the promise of equal opportunity. But we have not.

The process for using standards is not simple. It seems reasonable to have content standards developed in cooperation with experts in the content areas; that is where “experts” can help “locals.” And after that (again quoting Marzano & Kendall,1997) “standards-based approaches must be tailor made to the specific needs and values of individual schools and districts.”

So, the Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) regional educational laboratory long ago developed a data base of content standards along with advice on how to use them to develop classroom curriculum to meet the needs of the community. My advice is to use what we know.

This controversial and divisive topic of “standards” comes down to the fact that we can take a “content” standard, which is a description of what the student should know and be able to do (as defined by experts in a given subject) and turn it into a “curriculum” standard which takes into account how a subject is best presented along with suggested activities. This produces a usable instructional framework.

Ultimately, what is “best” for students in any given classroom can only be decided right there in the classroom, in real time, with much prior planning. This is a starting point in the travel toward excellence.

But we must be clear — standards for academic achievement are not the same as standardization of instruction.

And as was pointed out in A Nation at Risk, standardized tests of achievement should be “administered at major transition points from one level of schooling to another and particularly from high school to college or work.”

We sure as shootin’ blew that advice to hell and back!

Part 6 of ten blogs on The Road to Educational Quality and Equality that started with The March Begins.

There is No Controversy?

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Told by spokespeople for our representatives, reporters in Idaho are repeating the “fact” that the portion of the immigration bill giving citizenship to highly skilled immigrants in order to fill jobs Americans can’t (?) do is not controversial. I repeat (as they have multiple times in print and on air), there is no controversy. Really? There should be!

At Our Own Risk

At Our Own Risk!

The following was originally published in Idaho as a letter to the editor in 2011:

Easing visa restrictions for high-skill immigrants is necessary according to Representative Labrador [ ID] and his American Innovation and Education Act. The problem he targets is “to help people who have offers of employment but face a [immigration] processing backlog…” He claims it will help domestic students. Those closely associated with efforts to improve our STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) education in this country have heard similar verbiage for over a decade.

Congress won’t address problems they created through No Child Left Behind so we need to import talent that we failed to cultivate in our own country. They see a “brain drain”; I think it’s more of a loyalty drain.

This country messed up a perfectly good public education system and took down three generations of students in the process. We feel no obligation to make things right?

It’s not hard to see “How Online Learning Companies Bought America’s Schools” (Lee Fang). What’s harder to see is how we the people allowed Congress to sell us all down the river. We had better open our eyes to the slippery slope of importing high-skilled talent because we have overlooked our own American potential. Is this how we make America strong as a nation?

Change, Improvement, Progress

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“What Is Community Education?...Community Education brings community members together to identify and link community needs and resources in a manner that helps people to help themselves raise the quality of life in their communities…

Community Education results in:
•    A responsive education system and an improved learning climate in the schools;
•    Efficient and cost-effective ways of delivering education and community services;
•    Broad-based community support for schools and other community agencies;
•    An emphasis on special populations, such as at-risk youth and minorities; and
•    Collective action among all educational and community agencies to address quality of life issues.” Written by Minnesota Community Education Association.

Secretary of Education Duncan came into office touting the ideal of community education. What he has failed to see is that it is the only method proven over time to provide sustainable school improvement because done correctly; it will end up incorporating the elements of effective schools in its improvement process.

We all must improve by taking what we have learned and applying it to what we know can bring forth real progress for kids, communities, and our country.

Who Doesn't Need to Improve?

Who Doesn’t Need to Improve?

Mr. Secretary, you don’t have to reinvent; you need to rediscover what you already know. Get back on track to improvement and stay there. Persistence; isn’t that what the president has advised?

Exposing Educational Parasites

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Parasites multiply when the conditions are right; educational parasites are no different.

Look closer.

As a veterinarian, I’ve found that people don’t need convincing to rid their pets of parasites that they can see. If they can see them, they want the parasites gone. But the internal parasites — the ones they cannot or rarely see — are  harder to convince them to take action against.

I have seen animals in high parasite areas that didn’t get the attention they needed until the parasites had drained them of so much blood the signs of anemia became obvious. Damage was done.

And in certain areas of the country, spring means a rise in parasites because the conditions are right. But that warning on behalf of helping my furry friends isn’t why I’m writing this; I hope to make a memorable point.

When it comes to education reform laws and their intentions, more often than not, it is hard for the public to see the parasites feeding off the dysfunction of the system. Dysfunction — in a few schools or at the level of national law — is the condition that allows the education-industrial complex to multiply and suck public funds from our pockets — right in front of our eyes.

We see the education “programs” costing us but we rarely are able to see what is happening internally — at the heart of OUR government. So we have yet to rid ourselves of enough internal parasites to make the system healthy again. “They” are currently the same ones that put bad laws into place and have refused to make them right. They all know that No Child Left Behind had “unintended consequences” (update: that was not corrected by ESSA — the Every Student Succeeds Act). Certainly they must know it is wrong to sit by and let the “patients” suffer.

“They” are our congressional representatives, governors, and chief state school officers. And so many other groups have offered better treatment solutions.

It is hard to rid ourselves of things we can’t identify.

So my prescription is multifaceted. Expose the parasites. Call them out; ask for answers as to why they have not acted to correct the law and what their intentions are. Ask for documentation of their work. Rather than a FEDERAL “accountability” mechanism for local schools, where will the accountability of the government to the People going to happen?

Demand it! That is what congressional oversight hearings are supposed to do. The public deserves to know how their U.S. Department of Education sees its role in our public schools and what they are doing to better serve our nation.

Let’s get rid of some educational parasites.

Then, the very best medicine I can prescribe is prevention of the problem in the future.

We need involved, informed, forward-thinking leaders that will work with and for us — not against US! I can only hope all political parasites will be exposed and remembered in November —- consistently, every November, until the problem is eliminated.

“They” Have Plans for U.S. Children

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No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a failed experiment. That is, it failed as a reform for schools.

So why do Americans continue to trust many of the very same people who created the law to now lead us down yet another path – over a decade later? This time, the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) (ESEA_Task_Force_Policy_Statement_2010) plan to use the rewriting of NCLB to consolidate data reporting to a single “office in the U.S. Department of Education that manages all data requests and collections…” (with good intentions?).Screen Shot 2016-02-17 at 3.52.22 PM(Update 12/10/15: NCLB changed to The Every Student Succeeds Act – ESSA. The lead groups on Common Core — the non-governmental trade organizations CCSSO and NGA —have more power under ESSA than they did under NCLB.)

This country desperately needs to talk about proper roles of government in education. But for now, local control?

When and how students receive additional help should always be made at the school level. Do we need good data there? Yes. But more importantly, we need capable, caring people who understand kids!

Every state put in a longitudinal data system so that each state could track each student in order to make “better decisions” as to where and how to spend our education dollars — at the state level (?). Fair enough, maybe. That is supposedly why the Data Quality Campaign came into existence. But check out the campaigns supporters at the bottom of this page and ask yourselves, should data systems have been a priority?

“Coinciding with the movement for more and better data, federal lawmakers established the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grant program (part of the Educational Technical Assistance Act of 2002) to help states design, develop, and implement longitudinal data systems.” (Source New America Foundation, Many Missing Pieces)

People – this was back in 2002!!! And now, it is time to “consolidate data” to a point of central control. Our lack of vigilance has been astounding!

“…there was a diabolical realism in his plan to make all learning the monopoly of the elite which was to rule his envisioned world empire and keep the anonymous masses barely literate.”

That is what Eric Hoffer wrote in the The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. He was speaking about Hitler. Control of the education system is THAT important!

Stop IT !

Stop IT ! P.S. I think Godwin’s Law is detrimental to open discussions about our times and history.

Until the day that the anonymous masses of citizens once again have control over their government, we must defend every inch of control we have remaining over the public education system.

Welcome to the Real Education War!

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To know more, read about the power and control of the Common Core Standards and the excellent comments from the people.

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Addition 2/17/16: You can also learn more about the Common Core “Initiative” through this smorgasbord of blogs. I suggest beginning with “Research Made Me Do It.” What it made me do is take a firm stance against corporate takeover of the public education standards, assessments, curriculum, data systems, and the production of a totalitarian workforce development system.

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Addition 9/7/17: Consider this. ESSA State Consolidation Plans are all approved by the Secretary of Education. After approval, will all states then submit their data as evidence of compliance (“accountability”)? The “new” ESEA is ESSA. It delivered. The question now is, how much will we pay for it?

They do have plans for US.

Two more additions:

The Big idea?

Big funders? Big investors? Big pay-off for some.

Spring Cleaning: Letter Discovered

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You never know what gem you might find when spring cleaning. Here’s one to consider when looking at how we might truly improve public education.

My Message to Parents and Other Concerned Citizens About Cleaning Up the Mess Created by Outcome-Based Theory:

This current standards and testing movement that began 30 years ago is a bipartisan effort to make the “outcome-based” model for education “work.” The education industry has done quite well while our children have not.

The goal set by law, in No Child Left Behind, is unrealistic, unattainable, and frankly undesirable. Our American character embodies the ideals of freedom of thought, equality of opportunity, pragmatic resourcefulness, and individuality. This law standardizes the education “outcome.” Who defined this outcome for our children?

We should define the role of the federal government.

We must define the role of the state.

Locally, it’s time to take back our schools.

At all levels, it is our right to know the facts, to hear the truth, to be informed. It’s time to use politics to take politics out of the education equation. As a nation, we must press our candidates and those already in office to answer to us. Accountability starts with them, not our children’s test scores.

No Child Left Behind is the national education issue worthy of our undivided attention.

With Heartfelt Sincerity,
Victoria M. Young

What Failed?

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A Mind is Too Beautiful to Waste

A Mind is Too Beautiful to Waste

The beliefs — test-based accountability, financial flexibility, and “choice” — the principles — the pillars upon which No Child Left Behind (NCLB) promised “to close the achievement gap” — have FAILED.

The theory was hailed by state education officialdom prior to NCLB. So all-in-all this grand experiment, concocted by those unwilling to listen to people in the trenches, had decades to “work” to “close the achievement gap.” It failed; it’s a FACT!

People across America are waking up to the reality that testing itself is wasting instructional time and our money. Parents are seeing that test-based accountability led to a narrow and boring curriculum for their children. It is one of the reasons many left the traditional public system to home-school.

Many are also using the “choice” part of this failed equation. But the reality is that “choice-based reform” has not led to reform. And it must be remembered that test-based accountability was used to declare schools as failed thus trumpeting the need for “choice” through a charter system. Failed and double failed!

But what of “flexibility”? Ah, that began as a token gesture of local control. Giving the local people the ability to spend Title I money (federal education dollars for low-income students) in a manner they saw fit was actually part of the original 1965 law. But back then it was understood that the money would be directed to serve the needs of those low-income students. When the states became convinced that test-based accountability was the way to go, the stage was set for federal dollars to be spent on this new focus. The public was duped and double duped.

It is time to view education differently – accountability, flexibility, and choice have failed to deliver on what it promised. And in the process, it did damage. Face that fact. Riding on accountability, flexibility, and choice as reform strategies is like riding a dead horse. Have a little respect. Dismount and bury it!

Whoa on “Reforms”

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The following story was anonymously left in the mailbox of Dr. Emory Cowen of the University of Rochester and relayed to us through Dr. Seymour Sarason:

Common advice from knowledgeable horse trainers includes the adage, “If the horse you’re riding dies, get off.” Seems simple enough, yet, in the education business we don’t always follow that advice. Instead, we often choose from an array of alternatives which include:

Stop the "reforms."

Stop the “reforms.” They failed and are killing US.

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Trying a new bit or bridle.
3. Switching riders.
4. Moving the horse to a new location.
5. Riding the horse for longer periods of time.
6. Saying things like, “This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse.”
7. Appointing a committee to study horses.
8. Arranging to visit other sites where they ride dead horses efficiently.
9. Increasing the standards for riding dead horses.
10. Creating a test for measuring our riding ability.
11. Comparing how we’re riding now with how we did it 10 or 20 years ago.
12. Complaining about the state of horses these days.
13. Coming up with new styles of riding.
14. Blaming the horse’s parents. The problem is in the breeding.

Dismount! As Dr. Sarason wrote: “Instead of doing any of these, we decided to dismount. We began to look at what we needed to do for kids and their families to help them help themselves.”