Tom Ultican became a teacher of math and physics in San Diego after a career in Silicon Valley. He is retiring. He loves teaching.
He describes with precision the people who imposed bad ideas on the schools and messed them up. Maybe they meant well but their lack of knowledge or experience in the classroom led to naive and foolish and failed interventions, like Common Core and “turnaround,” with mad firings.
He writes:
“Standards based education is bad education theory. In the 1960’s Benjamin Bloom proposed mastery education in which instruction would be individualized and students would master certain skills before they moved ahead. By the 1970’s this idea had been married with B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist philosophy and teachers were given lists of discrete items for their students to master. The “reform” became derisively known as “seats and sheets.””
Tom says he is leaving the classroom. I hope there is a way to keep his kbowledge, experience, and wisdom engaged in educating the next generation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Interesting. Do you have a link? I think the original Bloom stuff is actually very good. What went wrong is making it punitive. —I guess that’s the Skinner stuff. I saw a great school system led by the late Al Mamary at Johnson City, NY, which used mastery learning and kindness in equal doses. It was very effective, including in raising scores, as well as making the schools a place where you’d want to be if you were a student or teacher.
I visited Johnson City when our district was looking to improve delivery of services to poor students. I recall they had two teachers in classes with mainstreamed students, and some in school wrap around services as well.
Exactly. In many areas, CBE is being pitched to save money on teachers. My district is going to have some first and second graders this fall in classes of 60-70, with one teacher and two aides, in multiple classroom spaces. The excuse given for this horror is that there are not enough teachers to hire. The ironic part is that my state has plenty of adults with teaching licenses to fill most, if not all, of the open jobs. But the state is unwilling to pay decent wages to teachers, and so a lot of certified teachers are going elsewhere.
The key thing Mamary did was to organize the school and its policies so that with the same teacher-student ratios as others, he was able to pull off the extra help for those students lagging behind, so they successfully reached mastery goals. I don’t know whether the situation is worse today on how many can be hired; it may be. Here’s my old account of it: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/1993/03/24/26berk.h12.html
Threatened: What is happening is so distressing and so unfair to our young people. How can they expect anyone to do a decent job under such circumstances? The war on education is not just a war on teachers; it is a war on children too. This is so unnecessary and unethical that the leaders of the country would stoop so low.
Hello Diane: I can’t help but recognize a resonant, if not implied, relationship between the test mania and the market mentality of “getting your money’s worth–now.”
Inherent in the process of becoming educated is the exponential and intimately related nature of both substantial human development and object-knowledge. Besides that, what we learn does not always manifest or even become relevant until sometimes-years any particular experience of learning.
With that in mind, and though testing, “grading” and pass/fail ideas have many other problems, these and their finality–especially for students who identify so much with grade–also fly in the face of the above basic facts of the educational experience and the process of human development that the human sciences have made us well-aware of in the past several decades. This is not to mention how testing pushes even further away the utter joy of learning that originally comes with childhood and that gets diminished if not erased as children go through their schooling.
It seems that the present cultural obsession with all of the principles of money-making have, again, permeated our thinking about testing and “account-ability” to at least correspond with it; and at most, and in great part, to be responsible for it. Such pervasive mental shifts and omissions are what enable the cancer on our culture to continue growing unabated.
BTW, I just heard that the Republicans have now labeled their new health plan “A New Foundation for American Greatness.” Sigh . . . .
A “New FAG”, eh!
One question: Ever try to do a jigsaw puzzle without seeing the picture? Teaching discrete skills is like having kids do a jigsaw puzzle without the picture while timing them and then say: “YOU’ve flunked.”
When we lose dedicated, insightful, career-committed veteran teachers, we lose the nation.
Around 1965, I conducted a little thought experiment with the Taxonomies of Educational Objectives, Cognitive (1956) and Affective (1961) by Benjamin S. Bloom among other authors.
I reframed every objective in order to create a parallel taxonomy of unmet objectives, basically using the taxonomies to identify learning “problems” and how these might be addressed in teaching.
The Bloom taxonomies (so-called) helped me to see that some attributes of thinking and feeling of potential value for learning in the arts were absent or explicitly rejected as objectives. The taxonomies did not honor “out of the box” thinking and conduct, or the ability to deal with uncertainty in the face of ambiguity. The taxonomies rejected the idea that education should cultivate some capacity to value or appreciate particular things, unless or until the valuation could be expressed as an abstraction.
In another life, I would take all of the grade-level standards written in umpteen subjects since the beginning of this century and do that same sort of exercise.
I think that exercise would make visible how standards, especially those attached to grade levels and “measurable outcomes” are too often functioning as straight jackets for teachers and students alike. Versions of standards have crept into managerial checklists and rubrics for judging the fidelity of teaching to each standard. Mandated standardized state tests are measuring students’ skills in test-taking but often justified as if the content and skills for each grade-level test had some unimpeachable relationship to standards. Wrong, and wrong in so many ways that books have been written about these problems.
Early twentieth first century education in the United States has been shaped by demands for strictly academic learning, rigorous this and that, and getting the right “mindset” for success in school.
For this generation of teachers, and too many students, there have been too few opportunities to experience joy in learning. Too few have had the time and opportunity in school to imagine what life has to offer besides scoring high on a standardized test, graduating from high school, going to college or getting a job.
Too much of the hoopla about education in and for this century is drowning kids in expectations set for them by people who have been more interested in the economic value of education, and its utility in training a compliant apolitical workforce, than anything else. We do not need more taxonomic structures or grade-level specifications for what students “should know and be able to do.” We need more time and opportunity for students to learn to love learning, not dread the test-prep and proctored exams. At minimum, we should ban the use of test scores to predict anything about the economy or determine which career paths any student should pursue. In this century, the whole concept of having a secure career path is malarkey.
Laura H. Chapman Here, here; and well-said, especially this: “Too much of the hoopla about education in and for this century is drowning kids in expectations set for them by people who have been more interested in the economic value of education, and its utility in training a compliant apolitical workforce, than anything else.”
It’s from people with specifically low horizons who compound the problem of their ambiguous (at best) rise to power by assuming that their horizon the significant-only one. Or worse, they don’t care; or even worse, want to kill anyone who speaks from a different or higher horizon, the higher, the more dangerous.
Once we treat education as something that can be scientifically understood, we lose it completely. Bloom started us down a wrong path. Once the idea exists that authority exists outside of the teacher and the discipline, the relationship that is education dies. Teachers become at best technocrats, at worst, roadblocks to education. Suggesting that objectives, now called standards, should be the focus of learning instead of the more nebulous term, ideas, has the the undoing of respect for the profession.
I agree with most of your thought in the post, Roy. Except. . .
Yes, education can be “scientifically understood” which does not rule out that the teaching and learning process cannot be measured and quantified. True “scientific understanding” involves the understanding of the limitations of quantification and measurement. The very non-quantifiable aspect of many areas of human endeavors that can be found in the arts, music, feelings, beauty, etc. . . does not necessarily rule out that some aspects might be quantified and truly measured in a description of some aspects of said activities. To rely solely on that quantification and measurement aspect, however, would leave us with a bereft understanding of many human activities.
Quantification and measurement does not equal scientific thought.
I agree with your point Duane. As Simon explained in the interview I linked to, the goals of education have to involve the student finding his or her place in the adult world, both as a person and in the economy. Both are in my view important. And these are not a matter of numbers, but an emotional match that is an outcome of the student’s school-supported exploration of the curriculum, including the arts. And any punitive approach damages this vital process.
But mastery of specific skills and knowledge is important to survive and thrive in our world. What skills and knowledge will depend on the students’ chosen path in life. But school should both make students aware of the demands of the adult world, and prepare them for it. And here I do think Bloom’s ideas, applied in a non-punitive way, do have a positive role to play.
One thing that makes IEPs a bit of a joke is that we had to frame all objectives in terms of measurable outcomes. Benchmarks for measuring the understanding of a math concept were framed as short sets of problems using a particular concept/procedure. Progress was getting a higher percentage of problems right over time and was supposed to prove mastery. The same process was used to prove mastery of punctuation marks or calculating density or…. There was no room for narrative when designing goals. Even interactions were framed in behavioristic terms so that outcomes could be quantified.
Laura, I appreciate that joy in learning is critical. I think that is connected to the student’s being able to link what he or she is learning with their projected life story, “what I want to be when I grow up”—even though that often keeps changing. (See Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, which Diane has referred to often.) I don’t think that is, though, antithetical to letting students know what they have to master to be able to be an architect or car mechanic or doctor—and then help them to master it. I think opposing these two as if they are enemies would be a big mistake.
I interviewed the fascinating guy Robert E. Simon, who developed our new town, Reston (after his initials), when he was 100. His last years he was obsessed with education, and brought the ‘whole community’ and ‘whole lifespan’ thinking to the issue. He said that the most important thing for elementary and secondary education was for students to discover what they want to be as adults, and also to prepare themselves for the next step to doing that when they graduate high school. So to find themselves, they need to have a rich, inviting curriculum, and no high penalties for failing at any one thing. But they also need to have rigor of being informed about what they need to master to realize their goals, and then being helped to do it.
Here’s the interview: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/22/issues-over-the-last-decade-have-me-really-steamed-a-history-making-centenarians-views-on-school-reform/?utm_term=.3d8ec074fbb3
https://tultican.com/2017/05/24/i-am-done-i-hope-public-education-is-not/
This is the link to the article. Diane, thank you for all of the encouragement and I do plan to engaged.
Tom,
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The idle rich, like Bill and Melinda Gates didn’t “mean well” in K-12. And, they don’t mean well, with higher ed. in their cross-hairs. They deliberately imposed their sick competitive scheme on the nation’s most vulnerable population, our kids, while sparing their own kids, by enrolling them in schools that rejected the cruelty.
Speculation was correct. The process that brought alt-right speakers to college campuses was not internally-driven. The twisting of “free speech” to promote the ugly plots of oligarchs was orchestrated off-campus. It is well-funded by the richest 0.1% like Richard and Helen Devos and David and Charles Koch. The talking points trumped up by right wing radio are part of the diabolical ruse.
Journalist, Stephanie Saul (NYT) identified the Young America’s Foundation as bringing speakers like Robert Spencer to colleges. “Spencer was cited repeatedly in the manifesto” of the Norwegian nationalist who killed 77 kids, kids who wanted to be part of a world that was not filled with hate.