Something interesting has happened to David Brooks. Only a couple of years ago, he wrote about schools that produced high scores as the paradigm of success. Now he describes a different skill set to define what is needed most in the emerging future.
As computers become more powerful, the usual definition of success will change, he writes:
“As this happens, certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.”
Read between the lines. The students who can pick the right answer on standardized tests are not what the new economy needs. It needs those with the ability to think outside the box. It needs people who can work in teams yet not be rule-bound.
Allowing a machine to assess young people’s intelligence and assign them a rating will punish the thinkers and doers who don’t follow the machine’s rules.
Standardized test belong to the age that is passing, the industrial era now gone.
Thanks, David Brooks.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bravo, David. Do you think you could give Thomas Friedman a call when you have a chance?
Brooks was always slightly brighter than Friedman. And perhaps when Friedman’s daughter has done her stint at TFA he will have second thoughts, too.
Yes, David, please. Take a stroll over and talk to Tom and explain this to him. 🙂
this is the crux of the matter: “”As this happens, certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable.”
there are different frames of reference when we assign VALUE…. I refuse to accept the predominant culture in how value is ascribed to people, to occupations (teachers are the peons and students are the lowest possible caste etc)… I reject their notion that machines are replacements of individuals; Cuomo senior was a devotee of M. Buber; not Cuomo jr– so what have we (grandparents) done wrong in raising the current educational /governmental leaders? Why does Cuomo jr dismiss the “I/Thou” relationships that his father studied faithfully? Evolution takes eons; centuries; brooks would like you to believe certain things about human and the quality of life that I reject. The colonialism , evangelizing with Common Core/tests, and the caste system have no place in a democracy.
In a September 12, 2012 New York Times column, David Brooks argued that it was the absence of the proverbial sword hanging by a thread over the heads of teachers that explained presumed lack of innovation in schools. I hope he and other supporters of current education reform are getting ready to repudiate that idea. There in no evidence, even in the private sector, to support the notion that innovation in product quality – not short-term profit — is advanced by fear. There is also no evidence that fear and competition will spur more effective teaching. If anything, the evidence suggests the opposite. There is also no credible evidence to support the reformers’ theory of action that merit pay and of the threat of firing of presumably low-performing teachers will drive systemic improvement. It is pure unsubstantiated ideology.
In his popular book, “Drive,” Daniel Pink summarizes the research regarding motivation. Extrinsic rewards are only effective to improve performance for short-term, simplistic tasks. Performance and learning with respect to complex tasks (teaching, for example) is undermined by reward systems. In addition, research shows that once a threshold of “fair pay” is reached, rewards for performance provide no benefit and may be counterproductive. Arguably, the result of reward systems – especially with untrusted metrics – is ethical lapses. We have known all of this for a long time, yet the reformers keep insisting on it as policy in the name of innovation.
Who among the supporters of “education reform” are ready for a different direction?
http://www.arthurcamins.com
Well said, Arthur!
Ed deform rests on two notions:
Learning is mastery of the bullet list.
Teaching is punishment and reward (extrinsic motivation).
These are breathtakingly backward notions. Our students will see more change in their lifetimes than has occurred in the previous history of the human species. The need to be intrinsically motivated to pursue unique interests, passions, destinies.
Brooks is wrong about memory, though, for a couple of reasons. First, memory provides grounding–the jumping off place. Second, a great memory presents at the time needed a range of previously sifted and stored, appropriate options to pursue in that sea of bits.
He is right about heart, and it’s a beautiful thing, indeed, that Brooks ended on this note. We’re not going to build that in kids–that passion for their undertakings, their projects–by doing ever prep for the tests on the bullet list of skills.
We’re not going to build that in kids–that passion for their undertakings, their projects–by doing ever more prep for the tests on the bullet list of skills.
It’s no exaggeration to say that we ARE our memories. This is true even though (and, in fact, because) those memories are largely confabulation. That memories are confabulations is, in fact, an adaptive mechanism in service of our projects, our concerns, our cares, of what matters to us, of our projections of ourselves forward.
In other words, that’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
“First, memory provides grounding–the jumping off place. Second, a great memory presents at the time needed a range of previously sifted and stored, appropriate options to pursue in that sea of bits.”
So true!
“The need to be intrinsically motivated to pursue unique interests, passions, destinies.”
Robert, I’m not so sure that there is necessarily a “need to be intrinsically motivated to . . . ” but more that being “intrinsically motivated” is is inherently part of the human experience of life and living. Schooling, the teaching and learning process should nurture, strive to develop, help blossom that inherent nature of being human and not to stifle or kill it through regimes of educational malpractice idiologies that attempt to conquer and control the mind, feelings and “being” of the student such as militaristic training techniques a la KIPP, etc. . . .
“It’s no exaggeration to say that we ARE our memories.” I completely concur with your post that starts with that line! Well said!!
That was a typo, Duane. I meant to write, “THEY need to be intrinsically motivated. . .”
I agree entirely, Duane. Intrinsic motivation is our natural state. We are born intrinsically motivated. Deform-style schooling exists to kill that. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Schools exist to make children ashamed of what they are.” Certainly, schools based on extrinsic reward and punishment systems do.
I do not want the following to in any way diminish the contributions of Daniel Pink and others, but they had articulate and prescient predecessors.
On best and worst management practices in the broadest sense, W. Edward Deming, starting no later than the 1950s. On the vain illusion of standardized testing being an accurate measure of crucial qualities, Banesh Hoffman (THE TYRANNY OF TESTING, originally published in 1962 but preceded by numerous public articles).
I take David Brooks’ [apparent] change of heart to mean something as yet unmentioned, based partly on his trajectory during the lead up to, during, and after the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the USA.
“You don’t need a weatherman. To know which way the wind blows.” [Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”]
Weatherman, no. David Brooks, yes. He can be a startlingly accurate predictor of a change in thinking and approach by important sectors of the economic and political establishment.
The headlong charge of the charterites/privatizers and their legions of edubullies to achieve $tudent $uccess at any cost to us hasn’t diminished—but the pushback to their Dash For The Cash is growing and in some places reaching a critical mass.
IMHO, David Brooks is simply another indicator that the tide is turning [albeit excruciatingly slowly] in favor of a “better education for all.”
😎
What a culture of mixed messages we live in! Kids are forced to take standardized tests and taught to comply – while we emulate Americans who “think different”. If I hear “think outside the box” in one more faculty meeting….!
It would seem that the politicians and Ceos who are driving this destructive reform movement are not creative thinkers, nor critical thinkers, nor thinkers at all. They are the wrong people to be attempting to reform our education system. History shows us that real visionaries know how to work with obstacles and create them into assets. We sure need them now! Diane, please pursue those debates!
Exactly. The ed deformers’ “creative disruption” amounts to a trip on the wayback machine.
Tell B for the beast at the end of the wood.
He ate all the children when they wouldn’t be good.
–from the first textbook ever published on these shores, The New England Primer
That couplet might as well be the motto of the current ed deform movement. This would be humorous if it weren’t so horrific for our children.
Or,
An idle fool
Is whipp’d at school.
The extrinsic reward and punishment theory of education. The Puritans held it. So do our current “education reformers.”
The deformers have a nostalgia for stocks and pillories and the absolute authority of masters to use them. And so they create summative tests and school grading systems and VAM and oppose even the eunuch’s shadow of tenure that teachers now have in some states.
Brilliant! The great and powerful has spoken so now we can all breathe a sigh of relief? I don’t think we need the endorsement of one man to fundamentally know that regurgitation of facts is not relevant to success. It is not now, nor was it during the industrial age.
The right to explore what it means to be human is not reserved for the academic or political elite. It is a fundamental human right. Our children are humans first and citizens second. This is an eternal truth. The human spirit is and always has been impossible to constrain.
History is a circuitous struggle for human rights. Inevitably those with power are either reluctant to relinquish it or narcissistic enough to believe they know better. Either way by the time people begin to feel the result of the oppression it usually requires revolutionary change to alter it.
Excellent post over all! I agree that the type of thinking that elevates some to a status supposedly “higher” and therefore more valued is fundamentally flawed.
“History is a circuitous struggle for human rights.” I prefer it to be a “spiraling struggle” as history never quite “comes back around” but does come around in the vicinity of where it was before.
I just posted about what I have seen as a major idiocy of the bubble test mentality as a measure of useful skills. Every teacher worth their salt has known the limitations of fact regurgitation tests. It is so comforting that those who should have known better are finally catching up.
These are not “fact regurgitation” tests. They are skills activity regurgitation tests.
They are content free.
Like the minds of education reformers.
But yes, the bubble test mentality is purest idiocy, of the cultish variety.
Tis why I call it “idiology”.
Idiot, from the Greek idios, “one’s own,” referring to those who lack understanding that there are many ways of being that are not theirs but are legitimate nonetheless–e.g., people who think that they can issue a mandatory, invariant bullet list of what everyone else must learn and teach and who expect everyone else to snap to.
The sample test items don’t look for one answer; they look for a set of steps that kids will go to. This whole movement is trying to teach thinking “outside the box” and then building standardized tests to measure it. While some questions seeking a concrete response, others are going to require rubrics and evaluators who will score them. For example, one fourth grade math questions asks a student to describe TWO ways they would solve a problem. But they don’t necessarily have to solve it.
We are entering almost a more dangerous realm of subjectivity in standardized assessments. If you haven’t looked at the test items. you should. There are way too many variables to standardize something of this magnitude.
Click to access Grade4Math.pdf
Florida backed away from the standards because they felt the standards had embedded non-academic goals, more affective/disposition type traits to be taught and then assessed on the test.
Again, subjective. Who can read a child’s response to determine if they are showing “perseverance” or if they are “inferring the correct meaning” from a lengthy passage when we understand meaning derives from the reader’s experience? All very subjective.
Rubrics exist to give to the subjective a sham objectivity.
And, of course, because they are quick and easy.
Remember, rubrics are the devil’s tool, first and foremost!!
Years ago, to my eternal shame, I created for a client what I believe to have been the first rubrics-based writing assessment system to appear in a major basal textbook program. It’s a long story. I have regretted this often. Those rubrics have led to the gawdawful, formulaic anti-writing that gets passing scores on standardized tests.
So, Don Duane Swacker, Hidalgo, you and I are in entire agreement on that!
“Years ago, to my eternal shame, I created for a client what I believe to have been the first rubrics-based writing assessment system to appear in a major basal textbook program.”
I will take it as a truth that you have done the correct number of Hail Marys, Our Fathers, etc. . . to atone for that!
Rubrics lead to formulas. Do this, then that, yields this, thus that. Learn to plug in the words and, voila, you pass.
The NYS 11th grade English Regents Exam used a formula. When I tutored the kids, I taught from the rubric. They always passed.
And what did it prove? Very little. Definitely not their grasp of literature. The new CCSS exams look to mirror this pattern. Now we will be teaching our students how to interpret and pass the test, not about the beauty of the written word and the glory of an enchanting tale.
I’ve used rubrics for writing and math (constructed response-type questions). They never covered adequately the students’ work. It always came down to teacher judgment, the same professional judgment that “expert” want to discount. They want us to be highly educated, but they don’t want us to use our educated brains to do our jobs.
It’s going to be very interesting, indeed, when these idiotic tests are finally rolled out nationwide.
Prediction: The creators of the Common Core College and Career Assessment Program (C.C.C.C.R.A.P.) will try to keep the tests from public purview.
Prediction: The people will not let them do that because they will be furious. Their fury will blaze from coast to coast. Politicians will find it impossible to quench the conflagration as it closes in on their offices.
Prediction: The tests will be released.
Prediction: When the tests are subjected to the intense scrutiny to which they will be subjected, the people will demand the heads of those who drove the deform juggernaut that rolled over their children.
Prediction: Many educrats and consultants and sycophants and collaborators now suckling at the deform teat will pretend they were against this stuff all along. Even the ones who worked on the instruments of the current deform will claim to have been members of the resistance.
I see what you mean. I find the sample questions very interesting (although beyond 4th graders?) and more than a simple identify the correct choice in most instances. As a special education teacher trying to teach 7th graders about fractions, an approach that went beyond rote was critical. I have seen math instruction at the middle school level improve drastically in the suburban communities where I have worked. The sample questions sound more like what I have seen although my students totally missed the boat well before fractions. They were unable to memorize math facts and really had little conceptual framework around which they could develop understanding. However, I would like to see this kind of assessment on the classroom level for formative purposes where it would be of some use. I suspect that many successful adults would have trouble with these tests and question the utility of national application of an instrument that has not jumped through any of the traditional hoops/safeguards in test development. I haven’t even gotten to my objection to the failure mantra and our national need to trump the world on tests that have already demonstrated their flaws.
I don’t believe him for a second. Brooks is a shill for the corporate class. He and Friedman are the advance army for the corporate reformers. Next we will see Gates and Rhee announce a standardized test and suite of computer apps that “assess” thinking out of the box.
The next out of the box idea these people have will be their first.
Yes, we are seeing in the name of “creative disruption” a great Powerpointing of U.S. education. Teach to the bullet list with educational software that consists of bullet lists on a screen. Summarize the results in a sham fable of a table.
I tend to share your distrust but I thought that there were a couple of salient thoughts:
“One of the oddities of collaboration is that tightly knit teams are not the most creative. Loosely bonded teams are, teams without a few domineering presences, teams that allow people to think alone before they share results with the group. So a manager who can organize a decentralized network around a clear question, without letting it dissipate or clump, will have enormous value.”
Is that not what this blog is? (with one of the results being Diane’s last book as she has said that this blog was one of the founts of information/thoughts on public education.)
And:
“Fifth, essentialists will probably be rewarded. Any child can say, “I’m a dog” and pretend to be a dog. Computers struggle to come up with the essence of “I” and the essence of “dog,” and they really struggle with coming up with what parts of “I-ness” and “dog-ness” should be usefully blended if you want to pretend to be a dog.
This is an important skill because creativity can be described as the ability to grasp the essence of one thing, and then the essence of some very different thing, and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.”
I don’t know if this definition/thought/idea of creativity can be specifically credited to Brooks but it seems that it’s a pretty good one, limited but good.
I hold out hope for David Brooks. He thinks, even if that thinking is sometimes in Aristotelian or Scholastic categories (essences). He seems a profoundly decent man. That says everything.
Leaning this way as well. If the corporate reformers can market the tests and convince people they will measure “creative thinking” there are lots of idiots out there who are willing to let their children be subjected to these tests, simply so they can see how creative their children are.
Too little, too late–a prime example of punditry at its worse. Over 20 years ago I sat in an auditorium listening to a professional test maker, who worked for college board, tell us that multiple choice tests are poor instruments for evaluating the kinds of skills schools ought to be teaching. It will take another five or maybe ten years for Brooks and others to realize that the entire reform structure of test, fire, and reconstitute was a failure. I can predict the title of Brooks article in 2021: where have our public schools gone? The article will go on to lament a two tiered educational system with the 1% enjoying their particular boutique private or charter school (at the publics expense) while an entire country sends their children to overcrowded public schools manned by teachers who earned their teaching credentials in a two week alternative certification program. The Secretary of Education will be a former CEO from Pearson and all teacher ratings will be listed on gov.com. He will also lament that not one teacher in the country has reached the satisfactory level, but will offer a new program—Bonus to the Top–that will reverse a country wide crisis in low test scores. The only good news in 2021 will be the indictment of Arnie Duncan for insider trading.
🙂
Alan, your vision of the ultimate reductio of education deform is chillingly accurate, I think.
Memory less valuable? I had major surgery in May. I am sure glad my doctor did not have to google tips on my anatomy and on surgical procedure while I was on her operating table.
amen to that!
However, the surgeon availed herself of technology that could assess your condition far better and in broader and deeper detail than she could have done unaided.
David, keep exposing the current educational insanity. Years ago, years before Big Testing, I had a student who had suffered brain damage at birth and left with health problems. This kid’s passion was tinkering and building with tools in hand; a pencil in hand to take a test in 2D (or a mouse in hand to output his knowledge onto a screen nowadays) he just couldn’t do, as it didn’t make sense to his brain.
My Geometry test on paper was useless for determining his knowledge of surface area and volume; but having him hold 3D models of what was represented on a flat surface brought out his knowledge. This young man went on after graduation to start a business doing custom home construction. His first customer was so thrilled at finding just the right person to do the work for her, that she kept him busy, right up until his death from his health problem.
After Big Testing, I saw the insanity of having students input knowledge by various means but forcing output in only one way. And the scores would continue to prove to them, in their eyes, that they were educational failures.
Right before NCLB I had another student who finally made it through Algebra. He was no slacker; he just found himself with no passion and aptitude for the subject. What was his passion and aptitude? Welding. That kid went on to do custom welding. and I know he could earn more than any of his teachers.
Too bad that the shop classes he so loved met their demise, because all students had to be prepared for “white collar” jobs (as one urban education consultant accused our rural ag teachers of not doing). Hey, buddy, how ’bout I rate your Palo Alto schools with an “F” and deem your teachers as failures, because you don’t have a Power Equipment Team? (Actually, if this person had bothered to look, we did have students attending universities majoring in Ag Econ, etc.; I guess he couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that some people actually enjoyed getting their hands dirty for a living in our economy.)
wondeful! thanks for sharing this!
Here’s what I posted as a comment:
MR. Brooks writes: “Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests.” Being a straight A student will only be unimportant if schools continue to test students using the regurgitation method as the method for measurement…. and of course that IS the method the “reformers” rely on. So if “reformers” want to prepare students for the work force, why do they insist on measuring school performance and now TEACHER performance based on student’s test scores? If we want to prepare students for the skills Mr. Brooks delineates in his essay we need to change the way school operates and the way we measure performance.
I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic that
David Brooks’ brain keeps turning toward the sun.
Uh, maybe. But as someone who lived through the NYC blackout (as a tourist), I can only say that certain “mental” skills become invaluable when technology is not there. And no one can count on it always being there.
Another thing, Mr. Brooks. This “voracious lust for understanding” you write about. That was driven out years ago.
Before the lust for Big Testing and Big Data that brought out the lust for more Big Money for Private Hands, I could count on wonderful questions about Mathematics from students whom one would not normally associate with wonderful questions about Mathematics. Students really did want to know what was the biggest number, what was Calculus. Questions beyond “when are we ever going to use this”.
Sadly, Mr. Brooks, because I taught in a school in an impoverished area, students soon learned that they could only ask about the day’s standard, dutifully copied into notes from the board on which it was dutifully written, because teachers were only allowed to talk about that day’s standard.
Veer from the standard being taught that day meant a note from an administrator that that was not allowed. Well, you could talk about such things, but only at the end of the school year, when testing was over. Well, that was not quite true, either, because we were encouraged to prepare students for the following year’s math class or Exit Exam. (Mind you, this “not veering from the standard” affected Math teachers first but spread into other areas as Big Testing took over those areas, too.)
As test scores rose, this “voracious lust for understanding” dropped. Students learned not to ask, teachers learned not to answer. The administrators’ mantra was, “If it’s not in the standards, you don’t teach it!”.
Sadly, Mr. Brooks, I don’t see this mantra changing. Students (and teachers and administrators), in order to get more points on a test (even one testing “critical thinking”), will be desperate to only want what is needed to get those points, and nothing more. Chopping up knowledge into discrete parts, putting them into separate boxes with no encouragement to “think outside the box”, and expecting students to put together “essences” is a fool’s errand IMO.
These stories are SO important. The deformers have no notion the extent to which their policies are warping curricula and pedagogy.
Kids differ. The invariant bullet list of standards doesn’t.
Let’s stop using the pejorative term “regurgitation”. How about “showing what you know”? Finland’s national exams require kids to write essays showing what they know. Is Finland guilty of pedagogical malpractice?
Has the NCLB era has NOT been one of regurgitation of facts? As far as I can see, it’s been the opposite! The high-stakes ELA tests tend to test for kids’ proficiency at using metacognitive reading and writing strategies. The teaching of history and science facts has been reduced or eliminated in many schools. Doing test prep in the NCLB era does not consist of teaching facts –on the contrary –little memorization occurs. Facts have been sidelined in this era. Is this a cause to celebrate?
Teaching facts is an essential –maybe THE essential –part of education. You can’t think, talk, read or write without a big mental library of knowledge.
Diane Ravitch’s Left Back shows that this battle between the proponents of teaching skills and teaching content goes back a century. Here are two great quotes from the champions of content:
“Mere form, mere power, without content, means nothing. Power is power through knowledge. The very world in which we are to use our power is the world which we must first understand in order to use it. The present is understood, not by the power to read history, but by what history contains” (James Baker, quoted in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back).
“Education [is not] merely…the training of mental faculties. As though the materials of instruction were a matter of indifference!…No, education is not merely a training of mental powers. It is a process of nutrition. Mind grows by what it feeds on.” –Cornell president Jacob Schurman, quoted in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back.
The mind cannot grow unless we feed it knowledge. This is an eternal truth.
The high-stakes ELA tests tend to test for kids’ proficiency at using metacognitive reading and writing strategies.
Precisely, Ponderosa!!! This is exactly the point that I made above.
I agree with almost everything you say here, Robert. I think I understand the distinction you make between learning and acquisition. (Not sure those are the best terms to use –are they yours?) So much happens in kids’ minds quietly, consciously and unconsciously, incidentally during reading and listening. More than what any test can measure. I wish we had a good way of talking about those cognitive events. You’re doing a better job of it than anyone I know.
Ponderosa, the distinction between learning and acquisition is a standard one in cognitive psychology these days. It comes from linguistics, where this was first studied in enormous detail.
Does this make sense? While we are learning, we acquire skills that allow us to manipulate/use/apply that learning?
Really good discussions of this distinction can be found in the following resources:
Radford, Andrew. Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English. London: Cambridge U.P., 2004.
Carnie, Andrew. Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Roeper, Tom. the Prism of Grammer: How Child Language Illuminates Humanism. Cambridge, MA: MIT P., 2007.
Indeed it is, Charlotte!!!
Different kinds of knowledge, skills, beliefs, habits, propensities, values, are acquired or learned in VERY DIFFERENT ways. Our teaching has to reflect those differences. Educators have a bad habit of grabbing and hammer and treating everything as if it were a nail.
Ponderosa, I love your comments as well. The distinction I draw between knowledge of what (world knowledge) and knowledge of how (procedural knowledge) is also a basic one in current cognitive psychology of learning. It’s often referred to as the declarative knowledge/procedural knowledge distinction, and it’s related to the distinction that psychometricians make between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence.
One can teach skills in a couple of ways: implicitly, as acquisition, or explicitly as very concrete, operationalized steps. The abstract skills list that is the Common Core in ELA encourages neither but, rather, explicit teaching of the abstraction. BIG MISTAKE!!!!!
As with discussions about liberalism versus conservatism, it’s almost impossible to get people actually to think about these distinctions because the moment they hear the words “facts” and “skills,” they assume a lot of nonsense connected to whatever entrenched position that they already have, and they don’t attend to the NEW THING that they are hearing. They literally don’t hear it.
Ironically, this is itself an instance of the sort of thing that happens with acquisition as opposed to explicit learning. They’ve acquired a deeply entrenched set of habitual responses.
Much happens in your mind, quietly, both consciously and unconsciously, or incidentally, during reading and listening–much, much more than what any test can measure.
Amen to that!!! That sentence, Ponderosa, should be carved over the entrance to every school, just below this one:
Learning is not something that is done to you for a few years at the beginning of your life; it is something that you do, for the usefulness of it, yes, but mostly for the utter joy of it, throughout life.
“. . . it’s related to the distinction that psychometricians make between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence.”
I’m not quite so sure that just two poles-crystallized/fluid of intelligence is adequate as if stiff vs fluid is adequate.
What if a fluid appears to be crystalline? If it is hard and solid is it not then in a crystalline state but we consider it in a fluid state.
My take is that all “thinking”, “cogitating”, “mental activity”, “feelings”, “emotions”, “pain sensations” etc. . . are all “fluid” in the sense of ever changing (even when it appears they aren’t like glass).
“Linguistic competence constitutes knowledge of language, but that knowledge is tacit, implicit. This means that people do not [typically or, in any case, completely] have conscious access to the principles and rules that govern the combination of sounds, words, and sentences; however, they do recognize when those rules and principles have been violated. . . . For example, when a person judges that the sentence John said that Jane helped himself is ungrammatical, it is because the person has tacit knowledge of the grammatical principle that reflexive pronouns must refer to an NP in the same clause.” [The technical term for this tacit knowledge, BTW, is the C-command constraint on the binding of anaphors.]
Fernandez, Eva M., and Helen Smith Cairns. Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011
What’s true of syntactic and semantic and phonological and morphological competence is also true of much else. Much of what people “know,” and especially much of their procedural or “skills” knowledge ,is unconsciously acquired via an interaction between innate functional structures in the brain and experiences that provide grist for the operation of those structures and that incidentally strengthen, prune, modify, or set parameters of those structures.
Yes, 2old2teach, but not only acquire–also use, adopt, prune, and set the parameters of those functional structures
Thank you. That’s why I like the word manipulate.
“Mere form, mere power, without content, means nothing. Power is power through knowledge. The very world in which we are to use our power is the world which we must first understand in order to use it. The present is understood, not by the power to read history, but by what history contains” (James Baker, quoted in Diane Ravitch’s Left Back).”
yes. yes. yes.
It’s important to understand, of course, the following:
a. Knowledge consists not only of explicit learning but of implicit acquisition (e.g., of internalized grammatical competence).
b. Knowledge consists of both world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how).
The latter–the procedural knowledge–tends to be conceptualized by educrats, these days, in very vague, abstract ways–as lists of vague, abstract, formal skills (The CC$$ in ELA is such a list) rather than of concrete operations to be performed and variations on those operations.
Kids are HARDWIRED to do inductive and abductive reasoning. You can’t keep them from doing those because that’s how brains are organized to work. If you make that reasoning, itself, the subject of study, that’s like trying to teach someone how to hit a baseball by explaining the mathematics of baseballs in motion.
One of the few good things to come out of the current deforms is that both of the new big basal reading programs–Pearson’s Reading Street and HMH’s Journeys have created units of selections that on the same topic–ones within the same knowledge domain (e.g., “snakes”), though peculiarly, they are referring to these as “themes,” when a theme, as the term is used in the Common Core State Standards, is a message conveyed by a work. That’s a step in the right direction. However, a lot of the material in these programs is the same old failed abstract skills practice because the CC$$ in ELA is a list of those abstract skills. That’s the bullet list to be taught. That’s what will be assessed.
The facts versus skills argument usually goes completely off track at the very beginning because people assume that those who support knowledge-based education want memorization of some bullet list of facts. There are some people who do, and those people are deeply confused. But the proponents of all abstract skills instruction all the time are equally confused. Material in a particular knowledge domain does not and should not be a hegemonic imposition of a preconceived list. Our goal as educators should be to build upon the intrinsic motivation that kids come into school with, to create self-motivated, independent learners. People do that by following their bliss.
Here’s the simple truth of the matter: Kids will read about snakes because they are interested in reading about snakes. They don’t do that because they are really excited to find out what method of expository development the author of the story about pythons in the Everglades used in paragraph 4. It’s not a terrible think to talk about that method–but such talk and activity should be sparing and should be in service of the kid’s interest in what is being said about snakes.
The CC$$ in ELA is a list of abstract, formal skills. It leads to instruction that puts those front and center–for example, to instruction that makes reading Emerson’s “Brahma” all about finding out what techniques of prosody he used.
Well, people read Emerson’s “Brahma” because he had something startling to say about divinity, and he said this incredibly memorably. The CC$$ in ELA encourages the sort of terrible teaching that reduces “Sailing to Byzantium” to a list of the symbols that the author used.
The skills learning should come about incidentally as people pursue writing and reading FOR COMMUNICATION. We read and write not to exercise skills but to communicate ideas. Those are what we should be focussing on, and doing that is what builds motivated, independent readers.
And that should not be done from some invariant bullet list. That’s how NOT to build intrinsically motivated, independent readers and writers.
And the motivated reader and writer–the one who is pursuing those ideas with a passion–acquires the skills, mostly implicitly.
MANY EDUCATORS DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LEARNING AND ACQUISITION, and THIS LACK OF UNDERSTANDING OF THAT DIFFERENCE FUELS THE CONVENTIONAL FACT VS. SKILLS DEBATE, MAKING IT ENTIRELY UNPRODUCTIVE.
Skills are mostly ACQUIRED, not explicitly learned, in the process of pursing knowledge that one cares about. That’s how we are built.
You know that
The great, green dragon
is grammatical
and that
The green, great dragon
isn’t, but the chances are that no one ever taught you, explicitly, the rules for order of precedence of adjectives in English. You acquired those rules by exposure to language. You have hardwiring in your brain for doing that acquisition automatically. Same is true for inductive and abductive reasoning. Yes, they have to be practiced and practiced and practiced. But again, that commitment to the practice comes from a passionate pursuit of something interesting, not from activities on highly abstracted, formalized skills.
Even people who are experts in symbolic logic do not TYPICALLY use that expertise in order to construct the rationales that they use in their daily lives and in their discursive writing and speech, in the same way that you do not use knowledge of your musculature and motor nerves in order to walk.
I agree with you. So, help me understand, why have teachers been told that they must use “direct” instruction for everything? Am I missing something here? Is my pedagogical foundation short a brick?
“Skills are mostly ACQUIRED, not explicitly learned. . . ” Is that only for “knowledge”? What constitutes “knowledge”. I’ve seen many different skill learned whether in speech (how does one learn to trill an “rr” sound in Spanish?) or athletics through repetition and direct explicit instruction in which the learner is internalizing what is being told to do and then taking those instructions and doing them repeatedly until the intended “skill?” or “knowledge?” becomes second nature. 2 + 2 = ____.
(I purposely left off the second half of your sentences so as to be able to bring in examples of “knowledge” and its acquisition).
“The skills learning should come about incidentally as people pursue writing and reading FOR COMMUNICATION. We read and write not to exercise skills but to communicate ideas.”
But do those “skills” actually come about “incidentally” or can explicit instruction not help develop those skills (example above)? It seems that you might be confusing the “overarching goal” with perhaps intermediary ones that can help a learner get to that over arching goal.
Duane, I dreamed about trilling the “rr.” I woke myself up when I did it. Unfortunately, i have yet to master it. I am so jealous of trillers! If you have any tricks, I’ll practice them in sleep tambien. Muchas gracias.
Butter is the trick!
Just repeat butter, butter, butter, butter, butter as quickly as possible for X amount of times. I’ve repeated it thousands upon thousands of time to get where I can sufficiently trill an “r”. When we go through the sounds of the alphabet there’s always a couple of students who can trill to their heart’s delight so I have them model it.
Now, I believe that not being able to “rrrrrrrrrrr em” is a function of physiology. You see if your frenulum comes too far forward on the bottom of your tongue then the tongue can’t properly vibrate to trill the “r”. As I tell my students one of the things they check for along with skin tone, proper number of fingers and tone, breathing, etc. . . when one is born is to see if the newborn is “tongue tied”, whereby the frenulum is attached too far forward (can later cause speech impediments). I was one. My mom related the story that when feeding time came there was one baby that sounded like a duck and one day the duck sound was gone (this was in the 50’s when they kept the babies away from the mom and brought them in for specific feeding times). She asked the doc what happened and he said “I clipped your son on both ends” (meaning circumcised me and clipped my tongue). Both of my sons had to have their tongue clipped.
So, if you still can’t do it after thousands of reps of butter, it may be a physiological thing.
I had heard saying “t d” is supposed to help as well. I have had limited success with that. “Butter” might work in that you/I start tripping over your/my tongue. It is quite an amusing exercise. Thanks!
One thing in pronouncing Spanish is that the tongue generally, and specifically for certain sounds remains lower in the mouth than in English. I had a Panamanian student (I believe natively bilingual) who said that when she spoke English it was like talking with a mouth full of food, for how high in the mouth the tongue needs to be for proper pronunciation in English.
So it might help to consciously trying to keep the whole tongue lower with the tip at the base of the alveolar ridge (the teeth and gum line).
Gracias.
I can’t snap my fingers either. I can do the ch in Chanukah.
Again, Duane, most of what passes for skills instruction is equivalent teaching people ballistics in order to take them from no experience of hitting a baseball to being a minimally competent hitter. You mentioned the trilled “rr.” In Russian, there is a liquid l sound that is a distinctive feature. If kids hear this sound before the age of six, they will be able to hear it as adults. If not, they LOSE THE NEURAL STRUCTURE that can make that distinction, and they can NEVER learn to hear it.
The CC$$ in ELA is a list of formal, abstract skills. The tests are tests of those. THAT APPROACH encourages an approach to education that involves ALL EXPLICIT INSTRUCTION IN ABSTRACTLY FORMULATED SKILLS ALL THE TIME, with texts reduced to the status of opportunities to apply these (as opposed to being means for communicating something to others).
So, understanding the distinction between acquisition and learning is KEY to understanding why the CC$$ in ELA is so dreadful, so amateurish, so backward, so uninformed by current scientific understanding of learning.
Yes, it is sometimes useful to teach skills AS PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE, and there are two productive ways to do that: implicitly, as acquisition, and explicitly, as a concrete serious of operations, not as a vague abstraction (like almost every line of the CC$$ in ELA).
“Yes, it is sometimes useful to teach skills AS PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE, and there are two productive ways to do that: implicitly, as acquisition, and explicitly, as a concrete serious of operations, not as a vague abstraction (like almost every line of the CC$$ in ELA).”
Give me an example of each situation. I think I have it, but I learn through models.
Duane, given your musings about the crystallized/fluid intelligence distinction, you will be most interested, I think, in this:
Click to access WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf
As I mentioned, that distinction is related to but is not the one that I was making between world knowledge (knowledge of what) and procedural knowledge (knowledge of how).
2old2teach: As requested, some concrete examples.
Learning skills by acquisition as opposed to explicit instruction:
Suppose that a child has not incorporated into his or her internalized grammatical model introductory participial phrases. The child never produces them, and the child is thrown off when he or she encounters these in writing. One can have that child memorize a rhyme that contains a couple introductory participial phrases. One can chant these rhymes in class. One can have the child write a sentence LIKE that by modeling in a sentence combing exercise. The internalized mechanism that the child has for intuiting syntactic structures from the ambient linguistic environment will take over. The child will internalize the structure. Teaching the child explicitly about participial phrases is irrelevant. That’s not how people acquire grammars. So, that’s an example of learning as acquisition.
Another: You want to teach classification by properties and relations. Instead of teaching, explicitly, what properties, relations, and classification are–hauling off at the beginning with a string of definitions and examples–bring a box of a bunch of random stuff from home. Dramatically shove all the stuff off your desk. Have the kids gather around. Dump the box of junk on your desk. Practice all the ways that you can think of, together, to put these things into groups. Ask leading questions to get them to do a lot of grouping by property. Then ask leading questions to get them to do a lot of grouping by relations.
Another: Don’t just have kids look up the definition of iambic pentameter in a Handbook of Literary Terms. Bring some drums to class. One for each kid. Beat out an iambic pentameter rhythm. u / u / u/ u/ u/. Then do this as the kids chant “Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?” and “Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, / Who is already sick and pale with grief, / That thou her maid art far more fair than she.”
Another: You want kids to recognize the archetype of the hero’s journey. Read to your kids and have them read a batch of really cool stories with that form, like “The White Snake” from the Brothers Grimm, Aladdin and the Magical Lamp, Theseus and the Minotaur, Siddhartha. Talk about the stories and what their characters and what these people care about and what happens to them and why and how things are different at the end and keep the literary terminology to a minimum. Do everything in your power to have your kids TAKE THE CHARACTER’S TRIP.
Learning skills by modeling of concrete procedures:
Don’t just tell a child to come up with a character for a story. Begin by having kids build an avatar in an online program by choosing attributes (clothing, hairstyle, props, etc). Then, have them build a character for a story by giving them a list of attributes to assign: eye color, skin color, hair, clothing, interests, beliefs, values (what does she care about?), relatives, friends, typical experiences on a typical day, country of origin, etc. So, you are giving a set of concrete operations–a procedure–for building a character. Do this. Then this. Then this.
etc.
Probably why my ESL, ELL, LD, BD, cognitively delayed high school students could spend serious time on scrambled sentences. They could demonstrate their understanding of how language is put together and begin to recognize structures and combinations that they did not consciously know before the exercise. It was a very popular activity because they were hard but there was no stupid, a label they were far to familiar with. As a bonus, they didn’t know I had an educational agenda until they were ready to hear it. Thanks, Robert.
But the main take-away here is not particular activity types. It’s this: Kids learn to read and write well by doing a lot of reading and writing that they care about. Most of what they will learn as they do that will be implicit. The sort of teaching that turns every act of reading into some sort of hunt for examples of some abstract aspect of literary works generally as described in some standard as opposed to the sort that honors what is being communicated KILLS reading for most kids. Again, ask yourselves why people read and write to begin with. It’s not to learn about literary techniques. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard a teacher say, “Well, the kids were really excited about x, but we had to move on because we had a lot of skills to cover.” YIKES!!!!
Put the work itself first and front and center. Start with the work, not with a list of skills. You will find times when it is appropriate to stop and explain some bit of literary or linguistic terminology. But make your class discussions and activities about the work, about what it COMMUNICATES, not a series of sterile exercises on CCSS.ELA.RL.5.4 and 5.7. If the piece you are reading is about a child lost in a forest, talk with kids about the child and the forest and being lost. If the piece you are reading is about video games, talk with them about what it says about video games. If your kids understand why anyone would bother wanting to read, they will read. And if they become readers, the skills will mostly take care of themselves.
Robert, I used to teach alphabetical order for the library by having each child fill in an index card with the first three letters of their last name (a la arranging books by the author’s last name). They then had to place themselves in a line in alphabetical order (first in small groups, then by the whole class). I could tell immediately who understood ABC order and who didn’t have a clue, just by observing. No paper or pencil required.
Oops: should’ve written “Has the NCLB era been one of regurgitation of facts?”
David Brooks considers himself a thought leader, absorbing new information from all sources in the universe, and combining this new relational information into new wisdom. As such he is less a hard liner and in a different world from Krugman and Reich on the left and Will and Krauthammer on the right. In a column of October 2011, Brooks describes being influenced by the research and writing of Nobel economic science winner Daniel Kahneman that human beings make rational fact-based decisions slightly less than half of the time. Mostly we are governed by quick, automatic, and associative pattern recognition, only mildly connected to documented fact. In that context, he can now “see” that most of the currently touted “school reform” measures are not based on fact, but rather on stylistic contrived thrusts, and innocent simplistic acceptance.
As I wrote in the introduction to my book, “American schools as they have existed and will continue to exist, are a product of their governmental and civic environment. Children develop in a world they inhabit, not in a school cocoon. Schools and children separate or together cannon be malleableized as a singular entity up or down. A Constitution, a Supreme Court, a President and a Congress as national entities that do not and are not expected to provide equality mandates about: household income, education of parents, children born out of wedlock, health care coverage, school spending, academic learning genes, and equal media representation; cannot fairy expect they can mandate “the schools” as a single entity to produce equal outcomes in all phases of learning for all children and youth in America.
People are revealed by what they spend their time doing–by what they attend to. David Brooks spends a lot of time writing and thinking, with a healthy dose of humility, about how to be a good Dad. That’s significant.
Here’s a different look at how technology is changing the learning environment. http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/
I love this line from the article, which appears in a call-out:
“THE BOTTOM LINE IS, IF YOU’RE NOT THE ONE CONTROLLING YOUR LEARNING, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LEARN AS WELL.”
Robert – this is an excellent link. I highly recommend everyone spend the twenty minutes listening to the video. Very entertaining and informative in a humorous manner.
I love the part where he says that the thrust of education is to turn us into college professors – all intellect, no body.
Concerned mom/teacher – this article is crazy.
My personal experiences do not support the premise. When left to their own devices students don’t necessarily choose educational pursuits on the computer. In the library, during their free time, this is how middle and high school students used the computer: to look up the kind of sneaker they wanted, to research prom dresses, to create an avatar, to play games, to try to get around the firewall and go on Facebook, to watch TV shows or movies, to listen to music and/or look up lyrics to their favorite songs. On occasion, they might pursue something intellectual, but usually it was recreational. My philosophy was that, since it was their free period, they should be allowed to pursue their individual interests. If they were part of a class doing research, then I enforced that task.
The next comment about free use of the internet, is that not all sites are created equal. There is a lot of propaganda on search engines such as google, including the order of placement of information. I always reminded kids that they needed to know who authored the site to determine it’s slant. For example, the accepted standard is to limit juice consumption and eat fresh fruit instead. If you go to the website for Florida Orange Juice, they will encourage the viewer to drink lots of orange juice to stay healthy.
By leaving students to choose their own web sites, there is no guarantee that they will be receiving accurate information (unless you are limiting them to preselected searches). Children and adults, need to be taught to be discriminating users. Expensive data bases help, but I’m sure that border town did not have access to this sort of technology.
Everything in moderation. I love my computer. I love the internet. I love Facebook. I love my iPad. Can they assist me in the learning process? Yes! Should they become my only educational tool? NO!
If something seems too good to be true, it isn’t true at all. Nothing is the end all and be all. And do not trust anyone who tells you differently.
I think this is one of those columns where David Brooks’ tendency to pontificate in glib generalities has really led him astray. There are so many obvious errors in the piece that it is hard to know where to begin. The first two paragraphs alone are a disaster.
Brooks tells us that soon computers are “going to be able to perform important parts of even mostly cognitive jobs, like picking stocks, diagnosing diseases and granting parole”. I’m not sure picking stocks is all that cognitive a job, but even allowing that it is, who does Brooks think is going to decide what data the computers use in the predictive models they use to perform these “cognitive” tasks? And who is going to evaluate the success of these models? And what makes him think that computers will be able to perform these jobs as efficiently as humans?
Brooks goes on to say that “certain mental skills” like a great memory, “will become less valuable because computers will take over”. Why does Brooks think having a great memory won’t matter? Because we can look lots of stuff up online? All of Wikipedia is of no use if one has no idea what to look for. Broad general knowledge — i.e. the stuff in a great memory — is a vital tool for someone using the vast store of data available online. Newer, better computers won’t change that.
Brooks goes on to say that being a straight-A student will be less valuable; but his definition of a straight A student is someone who is good at “gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests”. This doesn’t speak well for the grading in whatever schools Brooks attended, as good teachers grade not only on how much information students learn, but also on students’ skill at using what information they learn in classes. And though Brooks may be happy enough waiting while the tech he calls to ask about a problem with his computer (or the nurse he calls to ask about his health) searches for answers to his questions, most of us want to talk to people who can call to mind a lot of information and quickly zero in on the answers we need. We also want our electricians, auto mechanics, airplane pilots, airport gate attendants, Walmart salespeople, and any number of others to learn and regurgitate a lot of information when needed.
According to Brooks, “being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules” will also be a less valuable work skill in the future. I have some difficulty figuring out what kind of work he is talking about here, as I cannot think of a job that does not require people to do “mental activity that involves following rules” including what we consider to be low-skill, entry level jobs. Baristas must follow lots of rules and think about the rules in order to do them. University professors in math, science, engineering, computer programming, and other disciplines regularly engage in “mental activity that involves following a set of rules” as do lawyers, and even newspaper columnists. (I suppose it’s possible that Brooks thinks that someday we will all be able to communicate without the benefit of grammar, spelling, and punctuation rules, but that doesn’t seem likely.)
I won’t bother with more about this column because there is a much more significant lesson to be learned from it. The lesson is about the dangers of taking members of the “chattering classes” to be people who have particular wisdom about all sorts of things in the society. Brooks is by no means the only popular pundit who is treated with respect bordering on reverence when he spouts forth in an authoritative manner whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And, unfortunately, he and others are often get to do so in settings that give what they say added credibility. In addition to the NY Times, Brooks appears on both PBS and on NPR’s All Things Considered during their end-of-week analytical news roundup discussions. These are forums that have a lot of credibility, with hosts and reporters that that many regard as among the best journalists in not only the US, but the World. (I certainly think that of NPR.) However, even in these settings Talking Heads like David Brooks are allowed to say just plain dumb things with impunity.
Recently, I heard one of these conversations where the host brought up the recent chemical spill that polluted drinking water in West Virginia. At the time, the facts surrounding the spill, including what, if any, regulatory agency (state, federal, or local) might have had legal authority to prevent it were unclear. (From what I’ve read/heard in later stories, it may be a long time before the facts of the case are clear.)
Nonetheless, Brooks confidently stated something to the effect that though he normally favors local government action, there are situations where local officials are just too close to industry and federal regulation is needed. Basically, what Brooks did was to say that West Virginia government officials must have failed to do their job of regulating the chemical company because those officials were too easily influenced by the company. All this without knowing if West Virginia officials even had authority to regulate the company, let alone that they had failed; and with no information of whether the company was local or had any contacts with state officials. Yet neither the host nor the liberal Talking Head there to balance Brooks even questioned Brooks’ remark,let alone point out that Federal regulators were the ones who fell down on the job in the Deep Water Horizon spill.
One of the biggest problems about the current public debate on education is that so much of the discussion is in columns like this one of Brooks’ and that so many public officials buy into the sort of glib generalizations he’s peddling without asking obvious questions. (Like how can we be sure having lower test scores that other countries will make us less economically competitive in the future, given that for years the US has consistently been one of the most economically competitive countries in the world, while having lower tests score than other countries?) The US should not be making educational policy, spending billions of dollars, and disrupting the lives of millions of children, teachers, and parents based on glib, unsupported statements made by Talking Heads and philanthropists. I don’t know how to stop this juggernaut, but it does seem to me that calling out Talking Heads whenever and wherever they peddle this sort of nonsense cannot hurt.
Well said.
Thank you for the kind words — even though I did slip into that female habit of starting with “I think” rather than just stating an opinion as if it was a fact. Deborah Tannen’s analysis of how women speak differently than men because they have different goals in conversation. Including, it appears, online conversations.
You are right on the money, Sally.
The idea that computers will some day rule is pure science fiction.
Who would you rather hear a story from – Suri or a Professional Story Teller?
And research is gathering data and using it to formulate ideas. Sometimes results require a leap of Faith and more research.
Could a computer predict the discovery of penicillin from moldy bread?
Would a computer have warned Madame Curie and her daughter that they were being killed by radioactivity?
And if a computer is so powerful, why does China have an inoperable moon rover stuck on the moon?
I wish my computer system had a bigger vocabulary – it restricts my creativity and makes it difficult for me to use words which are not within its parameter.
Sending a hug and a kiss good night. Cuddle up to your iPad, it’s the new wave lover.
Ellen, Thanks to you too for kind words. As for Siri: There is no way she’s going to get close to a professional story teller for a long time though having been to see the movie “Her” recently I can definitely understand falling for a personal assistant system like the one Scarlett Johannson voiced. but, of course, it was professional story tellers who made the movie — not a computer system.
just in reply to test scores versus economic growth of the USA, I think you’re confusing correlation with causation. Surely you’re not arguing that low test scores cause an economy to grow? Changing gears a bt, there are umpteen jobs which are now filled with H-1B visas.
I am not arguing that low test scores cause an economy to grow. Though I would note that there are examples — present as well as past — of economies that have grown very rapidly, even with low overall educational achievement; oil states and rapidly industrializing nations, for example.
What I am arguing that the US is spending billions of dollars on the assumption that raising overall test scores is necessary to keep our economy competitive; and that there is no good basis for that assumption because our low overall test scores have not affected our economic competitiveness in the past. The assumption might be valid if people were discussing the test scores of our higher income students. However, when the scores of low income students are not included, US test scores are competitive internationally; so we don’t need to worry about these scores. (In fact, I believe that Diane makes this point in her latest book.)
The only good reason to worry about overall US test scores is as an indicator of disparities within the US educational system. We should be concerned that our overall scores are poor compared to a few countries, like Finland, where we know that the tests reflect the educational achievement of almost all students. In most countries the quality of education varies widely across socio-economic groups, and the tests are not given to a wide sampling of students. Those test results are not useful for judging how the US is doing relative to the rest of the world.
The reason we should be concerned that our overall test results lag behind countries like Finland is that it shows how badly we are doing in educating most of our less privileged children. That, though, is not recent news, and we have tools that are more sophisticated and useful than standardized tests help us analyzing this “achievement gap”.
We really do need to lessen or close the educational gap between poor and better off students, because rebuilding the middle class is vitally important to the future of America’s economy and the stability of our economic system. However, the Common Core standards, big data collection, and endless rounds of high-stakes testing are not effective ways to rebuild the middle class.
By now, we have an entire generation of students who have gone through an educational system that uses lots of time, money, and human resources on high-stakes testing of student “mastery” of content &/or skills dictated by “more rigorous” standards. Yet the litany about American students’ dismal performance and predictions that this dismal performance will destroy our economy hasn’t changed.
Imagine that you went to a doctor for twenty years, and during all that time he gave you the same diagnosis and the same medicine, promising it would cure you. Then one day, you go to his office and he tells you that you are just as sick as when you first met him, but he’s brought some new doctors into his clinic. They give you the same diagnosis, and prescribe the same medicine, though it comes in new bottles with different lables and stronger doses. Would you keep on going to the same clinic? Would you take stronger doses of the same medicine? Would you continue to believe in the original diagnosis? Of course not.
Yet when it comes to our educational system, our leaders, policy makers, and pundits seem to be quite happy to accept the same diagnosis, and the same medicine year after year. Doing so is easier than rethinking the diagnosis; and, in some ways, it is cheaper (while being more lucrative for the medicine makers). But it doesn’t cure the illness; and, in the long run, it’s worse for the country.
Like others, I think the real illness is poverty; and changing our educational system cannot alone solve that problem. In fact,I believe that the politicians and pundits — both liberal and conservative — who currently suggest that education alone can solve the problem of poverty are still copping out.
I’m not clear how H-1B visas are relevant to this discussion, but the total number (extensions & new ones) of these visa issued in 2012 was only 262,569. Maybe that qualifies as “umpteen” but I don’t think it is all that significant a number relative to the total number of US jobs that require a BA or advanced degree, and I am not inclined to side with folks who say that H-1B visa holders are taking away jobs from Americans &/or depressing US salaries. I’ll admit that I’ve not researched the issue, and am relying on anecdotal info on this. That said, my husband is a university economics professor, and I know that, for a good number of years, US nationals have been a small minority of the grad students in his department.
To the extent that H-1B visas are relevant to this discussion, the pertinent question is why — after years of NCLB and RTT promoting standards & high-stakes testing — more American students are not seeking the academic qualifications people need to get H-1B visas. Presumably, if our educational system was effective at turning out lots of highly-trained STEM workers, American companies wouldn’t be seeking more H-1B visas and moving high skill jobs to foreign facilities.
I suspect that the current situation at American universities is a dramatic contrast to the situation in the 1960s and 70s when we had many grad students getting financial support through Federal programs adopted in reaction to the launch of Sputnik. Moreover,many of the professors who taught them (and the parents who sent them to college) had benefitted from the dramatic growth in US higher education brought about by the post WWII GI Bill.
My point is that the government spent a lot of money building the huge store of intellectual capital that helped our private sector grow so much and made the US an economic giant in the last half of the Twentieth Century. Today, other countries’ governments are doing the kinds of things ours did in the last century. Meanwhile, we have a Congress willing waste billions of dollars by shutting down the government in a hopeless attempt to keep millions of people from getting health insurance. Even John Boehner is telling us that the House of Representatives would rather waste billions of dollars by refusing to pay financial obligations Congress incurred than agree that Mother Teresa is a saint.
On the whole, I’d say that even a “gazillion, umpteen, oodles & oodles of” H-1B visas are the least of our worries.
Brooks won this one—if his objective is to think and to get others to think. We certainly engaged in a lot of elegant thinking at all hours of the day and night on Dr. Ravitch’s blog. Perhaps we too are members of “the chattering class” ! !. I THINK that this is a good thing.
That article is insanity.