Category Archives: Books

A Response to Diane Ravitch Blog Post, Poverty Matters

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Poverty Does Matter, but not the way we like to think!

Poverty is important and it does matter, very much, in fact. And no, poverty is not a state of mind; it is a tragic condition in which millions of Americans languish.

Poverty is also an excuse for throwing up our collective hands as if the outcomes are out of our control. It is an excuse for continuing to do the same things we have always done, unquestioningly, convinced we are doing the best we can for the children in our classrooms, under adverse circumstances.

We cry out: “If only Congress would raise minimum wages; change the tax structure to more equitably spread the burden; if only they would find a way to lift the horrible mantle of poverty we could really help these kids.”

And, before you rush to stereotype reformers and their pseudo-counterparts and shut down your minds, I grew up in a low-income family and attended a school that, sixty years ago, was 30 percent black and 50% impoverished. In my first job as a juvenile probation officer I sat across a rickety card table that served as the dinner table for a mother striving to rear 4 children on welfare, drinking coffee while trying to find a way to keep her sons in school and out of the juvenile detention facility.

I sent my own three children to city public schools so they would learn to feel at home in the midst of diversity and not grow up to be elitist, upper-middleclass Americans, out of touch with how so many of our fellow citizens must live.

What I have learned from my own parents and from a lifetime of experience is that it is not poverty that keeps children from succeeding in school. For generations there have been children from the poorest families who have somehow learned how to excel academically; and these were not outliers to be discounted as not relevant to our discussion. Almost without exception there is a characteristic common to all of these youngsters. These children are blessed to have a parent or guardian who somehow still clings to hope that their child can have a better life.

Let’s cling to no illusions about the difficulties these parents face or that such parents are always successful. Sadly, many do fail in spite of the heroic efforts that are made . What matters, however, is that many do not fail and, as a result, their children enjoy some level of academic success.

It is not poverty that keeps children in poverty, it is the hopelessness that so often accompanies poverty. Poverty is, indeed, a very real condition but hopelessness is very much a state of mind. The operative question is why we do not attack hopelessness, ferociously. Hope and expectations are inextricably connected.

As much as I admire and respect public school teachers our public educators, as a whole, whether policy-makers, professors in college departments of education, administrators, or teachers cling to the traditions of an early twentieth century educational process that is woefully inadequate in a twenty-first century world; totally unaware of how what they do contributes to and reinforces the hopelessness of our nation’s disadvantaged.

These educators are blind to the fact that our educational process is focused on failure and sets the most vulnerable of our nation’s children up for failure and humiliation. Is it any wonder that these youngsters grow up to spawn new generations of children with little if any motivation to learn and even less hope for a better life.

For the love of all that is precious in life, can we not abandon our outdated assumptions and biases and open our hearts and minds to a new way of thinking about education in America? If only we will relinquish our obsession with tradition and open our minds to new possibilities we will discover answers that have existed, right in front of us, just beyond the illusory horizon of intransigence.

To you, Diane Ravitch, who for so long has been one of our best and brightest advocates for excellence in education, we need you seek to understand rather than rebut. We need you to think exponentially and to provide a whole new level of leadership in a fresh paradigm.

I am not suggesting that there is a perfect solution to the challenges of education in America; there is no such thing as a perfect solution. With each stride down a new avenue of thinking, however, we will discover new and better ideas and each new answer will lead to whole new sets of questions followed by even more answers and even better ideas.

You know better than any of us that time is of the essence. We must act before those who are rushing to privatize education, place even more reliance on standardized competency examinations, and who want to separate our schools from the communities they exist to serve lead us to disaster.

Things You Can Do, Today, Tomorrow and the Next Day, Part 1

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This is the first of a series of articles written to explore specific things individual men and women can do to make a difference in the world around them. Making a difference is what leadership is all about and, ultimately, each of us will be judged as a leader on the basis of how much of a difference did we make and toward what objectives.

Positive leaders are whole people and their leadership extends to all aspects of the world in which they live and interact. These men and women recognize that we are all interdependent and that nothing leaders do can be done in isolation.

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The key to leadership is action! Our discussion of leadership would be meaningless unless we offer specific suggestions for action strategies that can be implemented immediately. Things you can do that will have a dramatic impact on your life and on the world around you.

Each of these things is not only possible they are imminently doable. All that is required is a willing participant who will open his or her heart to the possibilities and will act and act now!

Our discussion will address strategies for the full spectrum of our lives to include home, the community and the workplace. This list of strategies is not intended to be exhaustive. Our purpose is to get you started, to serve as an ignition system. The list is as long as your imagination and success requires that you utilize your imagination, fully.

ACTION STRATEGIES FOR HOME

1. Exercise your mind, body and self esteem.

Actions:
Implement an exercise program to get your body in shape. Do it at home or away from home. Walk, exercise, play tennis or basketball, ride a real or stationary bicycle, join a health club, take aerobic classes, join the mall walkers’ club at your nearest shopping mall. Do not overdo it! Start slowly and build up to a daily regimen that works for you, but make a commitment and stick to it. You will feel better, have more energy, more stamina, and more enthusiasm for life and be less susceptible to depression.

Initiate a reading program. Set aside at least fifteen to twenty minutes a day, at a time that works well for you, to read something educational or inspirational, beyond the local newspaper. Feel free to vary the material you read according to your interests and activities and according to your job requirements. It will expand your mind and your imagination, introduce you to new ideas, broaden your vocabulary, improve your positive outlook, and inspire you to live your life more fully.

Commence a serious regimen for your self esteem. Listen to motivational tapes. Smile and talk to yourself in the mirror. Read motivational books. Keep a diary of your innermost thoughts and feelings as you strive to build a positive self-concept.

Become a giver rather than a taker. Begin to think of yourself as a giving person and start doing things for other people. Nothing makes us feel better about ourselves than to receive positive feedback from the people in our lives; and nothing generates positive feedback from the people in our lives more than doing things to help those people feel good about themselves. Share yourself with the people about whom you care! These things you do for yourself, but not only for yourself. The best way to enhance your contribution to your family, your job, and community is to take good care of yourself. You are important to the people in your life. They care about you and they need you. Take good care of yourself for their sake as well as for your own sake.

Go on a sensible diet, not a fad diet; take a vitamin and mineral supplement. If you are unhappy with your appearance, do something about it. Get a new hair style; dress differently; try a different style of eyeglasses.
Begin to look at yourself through different eyes. When you look at yourself through the eyes of someone who feels good about him or herself you can begin to see the warmth and the friendliness in your face, especially if you are smiling. Discard the idea that you have to look like a movie star; very few people possess that type of good looks. Think instead of all the friendly and interesting people you know. Think about their faces and their appearance. How do you perceive them? You enjoy seeing them because they are warm and friendly people and the various characteristics of their appearance are distinguishing. What draws you to them is not their facial or physical beauty, but their warmth and friendliness, their openness and their genuine concern for you. Think of yourself as this type of person and very soon you will begin to see that type of person when you smile at yourself in the mirror.

Think positive, life-affirming thoughts as often as possible. Fill your mind with positive thoughts and purge yourself of as many negative thoughts and feelings as possible. Count your blessings. Do not be discouraged when negative thoughts keep cropping up. They are normal for all human beings. Think of it as weeding the garden. The more you pull the weeds the more the flowers flourish, yet the weeds keep coming. It is a never-ending job. Once you have cleared the garden a few times, however, the weed growth begins to diminish. So, too, will it be with your negative feelings and thoughts.

Change the way you respond to people. When someone asks how you are doing, how do you respond? Try something new the next time someone asks. Say: “Better than I have in a long time!” If they want to hear more you can say: “I have been working to develop a positive attitude and it has given me a whole new outlook on life.” You don’t have to say any more than this but be sure to smile when you say it. If people want to know more then don’t be shy. Share your gift of positive living with them and you will feel even better about yourself. Do not worry as you would in the past, about being embarrassed.

Pay attention to the other people in your life. When you meet other people, do not push your ideas on them but reach out to them in a totally different way. Give them your attention, after all attention is one of the greatest gifts you can give to another human being. Listen to them and hear what they are saying. Ask relevant questions that demonstrate that you are listening. Give them positive feedback and encouragement at every opportunity without preaching and without talking about yourself. Do not talk about yourself at all unless they ask, specifically. The more you truly listen to others and give them fully of your attention, you are making them feel like the most important person in the world and they will choose to spend more time with you than they may have ever done in the past.

Do a self-assessment exercise. Make a list the things you like about yourself and that other people like about you and then rejoice in and celebrate the positive things in your life. Also list those things about you about which you are unhappy. Pick up to five of the things about which you are unhappy and develop action strategies for change. If you commit to those action strategies it won’t be long until you will be scratching things off of your list or transferring them to the list of things you like about yourself. When you eliminate an item from this latter list, replace them with another item.

The Wide Disparity of Pricing for Healthcare Services is Just a Taste of the Problems Yet to Come

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This past week, ABC News reported on the practice of the Northside Hospital System in Atlanta of charging outrageous prices for their services. They cited the bill of one patient where they did a line by line analysis of charges. What they found were many examples of line items for which the patient was charged exorbitant prices for things that the hospital could purchase through its suppliers for a tiny fraction of the cost. One of the most glaring examples was a pill for which the patient was charged several hundred dollars in spite of the fact that the hospital could purchase it for less than a nickel.

Hospitals across the country engage in such pricing strategies, to one degree or another, in order to make up for losses as a result of low reimbursement rates by health insurance, managed care companies, Medicare, and Medicaid and also as the result of the cost of doing business in a dysfunctional system.

This practice is considered a strategy of necessity by providers of many healthcare services simply because that is the way the fee-for-service, zero-sum billing game has evolved. Payers establish reimbursement rates that enable them to stay in business, which means making a profit. And, do not be confused by hospitals that claim to be not-for-profit for even these providers must be able make money if they want to stay in business. The only differences are the uses of the profits and the bank accounts into which the dollars must inevitably be deposited.

Every billable medical or hospital procedure results in high-stakes competition to determine where those dollars will end up. Health insurance, managed care companies and other payers set reimbursement rates and also make providers jump through hoops as part of the claims processing strategy to look for any reason to justify denial of the claim. This forces providers to develop coding and billing strategies to optimize their revenue generation and also requires them to file and refile claims. It is a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers in the competition for each and every healthcare dollar, not counting the patients who almost always are losers in the billing game.

What charges are not reimbursed by the various third-party payers are then billed to patients. Some of the money is eventually collected and much of it must be written off. Families burdened by outrageous medical and hospital bills is the single greatest cause for most of our nation’s personal bankruptcies. The write-offs necessitate new and more innovative charging and billing strategies. It is a vicious circle that drives up the cost of care enormously. Although we have seen some improvement, in recent years, in the rate of increase of aggregate healthcare costs, for at least two full generation the rates of increase have been substantially higher than the Consumer Price Index (CPI). There have been many years when the rate of increase has been double- or triple the rate of the CPI. Higher costs require providers to increase prices, which requires insurers to increase premiums on a merry-go-round that is anything but merry to the patients.

When we think about the number of healthcare dollars that never end up in the hands of providers of actual medical, hospital, or ancillary care, it can be a staggering amount. The insurance, managed care, and government payers always underestimate the percentage of dollars that are allocated to the administration process relative to those spent on direct care to patients. That cost is not just the cost of doing business for the private and public payers (which for the private payers must include profits) it also includes every dollar spent by providers for the purpose of coding, billing, claims processing, and management of receivables.

It truly is an outrageous process but it is the inevitable companion to the practice of fee-for-service (FFS) medicine in a market driven by health insurers and other third-party payers and processors.

The process is so complex that, in spite of claims on the part of health insurance and managed companies to the contrary, there is no accountability. Incompetent and inefficient providers pay no penalty for their poor performance and both the best and the worst providers survive no matter what the level of patient satisfaction.

Free market forces, in the true sense of the concept simply do not function in healthcare.

The biggest problems in healthcare in America, whether speaking of quality, cost, or access are the inevitable outcomes of a system driven by health insurance, Managed, care and other third-party providers; both public or private.

That Obamacare or, more correctly, the Affordable Care Act, (or more appropriately the Affordable Health Insurance Act) commits us to a health-insurance driven market is a recipe for continuing and escalating disaster. The motivation of Obama and the members of congress who finally chose to act was admirable if misguided. We have tried to fix a system driven by forces that even our smartest people seem unable to comprehend with a solution that can only aggravate an already tragic reality.

It is, truly, a national embarrassment that so many citizens of what we consider to be the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world must deal with illness and injury of themselves and their families without access to what we also describe as the highest quality healthcare on the planet.

What makes the situation most ludicrous is that it is our stubbornness and our prejudices that keep us from embracing a solution that will provide comprehensive healthcare and prescription drugs to every single American man, woman, and child, without relying on socialized medicine, at a cost that will save the American people trillions of dollars.

My book, Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, lays out a healthcare plan that will give us everything we need, at a reasonable cost, without any of the things that the American people seem to fear, pathologically.

Don’t believe me? Check it out!

Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch, a Journaled Review by Mel Hawkins, Entry #1

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This is the first installment of what will be a journaled review of Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch; her latest and possibly most important work.

In her Intro, Diane Ravitch says that her purpose is to answer 4 questions:

1. Is American Education in crisis?
2. Is American education failing and declining
3. What is the evidence for the reforms now being promoted by the federal government and adopted in many states
4. What should we do to improve our schools and the lives of children?

Ravitch says that American education is in crisis “because of persistent, orchestrated attacks on them and their teachers and principals, and attacks on the very principle of public responsibility for public education.” She adds that “these attacks create a false sense of crisis and serve the interests of those who want to privatize the public schools.”

This statement begs the question of why did the orchestrators of such attacks find it necessary to attack public education in the first place? While I agree with her that the evolving focus on privatization is a bad thing, there must be some acknowledgement of responsibility for the outcomes to which these unidentified forces are reacting.

While it is natural for educators to be defensive and feel unfairly blamed while in the midst of the criticisms raining down on them, claiming the criticisms to be unfair without addressing the outcomes about which the critics are concerned is simply not acceptable. Educators are no more able to fairly judge, unilaterally, the efficacy of their product than members of a production line in a manufacturing operation are able to judge the performance of the goods they produce outside the context of the customer who pays for those goods.

The only people who can fairly judge the value of education are the people who rely on the ability of public school students to perform in the marketplace upon completion of their schooling. As a former employer, I can tell you that it became increasingly difficult to find young men and women who have the minimal academic skills necessary to do the work for which we were prepared to pay them. Employers have a right to pass judgment on the performance of our public schools.

As an tester responsible for administering the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), I am in a position to judge the efficacy of an educational system that produces so many young men and women who are either unable to meet the minimum requirements for enlistment eligibility or who, if eligible, are able to perform the work required of them after induction in only the lowest career areas.

If teachers, particularly of middle and high school students, were able to set aside worries about who is to blame for the problem, they would be in a great position to tell us that far too many students are either unwilling or unable, either, to do the academic work on the one hand or display good citizenship on the other.

The question is not whether or not our systems of public education are in crisis, because it most surely is, rather it is what and who are responsible for the crisis.

Sadly, most of these critics assign responsibility for the poor performance of our public schools on the wrong things. We blame poverty, we blame racial discrimination and segregation, and we blame our teachers and our schools.

As was noted in my initial review of Ravitch’s book, as well as in my own book and blog, we misinterpret the causes of the disappointing performance of our public schools. Because of our incorrect assessment, we fail to see that teachers, rather than bearing the brunt of the responsibility for what is clearly a crisis in public education, are as much victims of the system as are their students.

As is always the case, if we are unable to come up with an accurate diagnosis of the problem, we are rarely able to identify meaningful solutions.

Were we able to discover and agree on the true causes of our educational crisis we would know, with a high degree of certainty that testing, privatization, vouchers and other tools to give parents more choices are not the solution to the problems of public education. These things make it more difficult for teachers and schools to do their important work rather than easier.

The true causes, as we have so frequently pointed out, are 1) a growing cultural disdain for the value of education on the part of far too many American parents and the resulting lack of a strong motivation to learn on the part of their children, and 2) that the educational process that has evolved, over the last century or more, is poorly designed and structured to produce the outcomes we so desperately need. The American educational process is the equivalent of early twentieth-century design and technology striving to compete in the Twenty-first Century. No amount of tinkering with the system with incremental modifications will work. The system must be reinvented to produce the outcomes we need from it.

Let us return to Ravitch’s purpose which was to answer her four questions. The American systems of public education are clearly in crisis and it is failing to meet the needs of both American school children and the society which will someday depend on their contributions.

As far as question number three is concerned, there is no evidence for the reform initiatives being promoted by the federal government and other policy-making forces as they are all premised on faulty logic. Any solution constructed on a faulty foundation must, inevitably, crumble.

The answer to question number four is that we must do nothing “to improve our schools and the lives of our children?” until we take the time to understand the root causes of the problems of public education in America. For that reason, finding the root causes is the categorical imperative of our time.

It was for this very purpose that my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America was written.

Ravitch, correctly, goes on to say that our schools are not “fine just as they are.” She then lists what she believes “American education needs,” and while none of these things are bad for our public schools, not a single one of them addresses the root causes for our system’s problems. As a result, they will not only make no appreciable difference, they will be harmful because of the opportunity cost they engender as they keep us from doing what we should be doing.

The sad thing is, that we already have the capability to fix public education in America even though it will be a formidable challenge.

Ravitch is absolutely correct, however, when she says that “The purpose of elementary and secondary education is to develop the minds and character of young children and adolescents and help them grow up to become healthy, knowledgeable, and competent citizens.”

She is also correct that the solution is to give schools and their teachers the resources that they need to do their jobs. We simply must rethink what those resources are.

Another area where Ravitch and other opponents of many of the “privatization” reform initiatives are wrong is in seemingly suggesting that schools and teachers should not be held accountable through the independent measurement of outcomes. As we will discuss later on, we need to develop an integrated quality system much like modern business organizations have done. What the skeptics will discover, if they make an effort to understand how such systems work, is that such quality systems actually help rather than hinder the worker’s ability to do his or her job. The same will be most assuredly true for teachers.

Gov. Christie, “Failure Factories” and other Follies in the Debate on Education

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You and others are correct to reject the arguments of politicians like Christie and the many so-called business gurus who advocate privatization of education, vouchers, and reliance on testing to assess both student and teacher performance and who blame teachers and their unions for the problems with education in America. Critics of these initiatives are wrong, however, to cite them as examples of the danger in applying business principles to problems in our schools. These proposals have nothing to do with business principles.

These same critics are also wrong to defend the state of education in America as something less than a crisis. Administrators, educational researchers, and policymakers are poorly positioned to judge the performance of public education.

If you wish to know the truth about the quality of education in America, ask the employer who is struggling to hire people who can read, write, and enumerate with any level of sophistication. Ask test administrators like myself, who see only minimal improvements in the number of young people, over the past decade, who can earn the minimum score on the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) to gain eligibility for entry in to the Armed Services of the United States. Ask the middle school and high school teachers of our urban public schools who devote so much time to dealing with behavior issues in their classrooms that teaching has become problematic.

Draw your own conclusions when you examine the results of the performance of American children, as documented by PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), when compared to children of other developed and developing nations.

Our systems of education in America derive no benefit when their advocates lash out at critics and pull their heads inside their shells while claiming that everything is getting better.

The crisis in education in America is real and we stumble along making the same mistakes that we’ve been making for generations and offering up the same excuses. It is poverty, they say as if the acknowledgement somehow absolves them of their responsibility.

The problem is not poverty and it is not racial discrimination or segregation; it is not bad teachers and schools; and it is not fractured families living in deteriorating urban and rural communities. I suggest an alternate hypothesis that the relationship between poverty and the failure of our educational systems, along with deteriorating urban communities, is not causal, rather that they are all symptoms of the same pathology. It is our unwillingness to challenge the conventional wisdom about theses systemic issues that blinds us from the real truth.

When we look at the problem and study the children who are failing we are looking through the wrong end of the microscope and we are asking all the wrong questions. There is only one question that we need to ask and the answer to that one question will tell us everything we need to know to solve the problems of education in America, which, by the way, will lead to the solutions of poverty, and deteriorating communities. What is that one question?
That question is not “why do children fail?” rather it is: “what do children who succeed have in common with one another?” Or, re-phrased, what is the one characteristic shared by almost every single successful American primary and secondary education student?

We will be surprised to discover that it is not affluence because just as there are poor children who excel academically, there are affluent students who fail as badly as some of their economically disadvantaged classmates.
It is not race, because the list of the academically excellent includes white children, and black children, and children with skins that span all of the hues and colors in between.

It is not fractured families because there are children who excel in school who live in single-parent homes or with families that are otherwise distressed just as there are children from intact families who fail, miserably.
It is not bad neighborhoods because there are children from the most dreadful surroundings who somehow perform well in school just as there are children at the other end of the performance continuum who live in the best neighborhoods in America.

Finally, it is not bad schools populated by bad teachers, because students from both ends of the performance continuum can be found in our best and in our worst schools.

The one single characteristic that most links our best students, wherever we find them, is that they are supported by one or more parent(s) or guardian(s) who are determined that their children will get the best possible education and who consider themselves to be partners, sharing responsibility for the education of their children with teachers and principals.

Think for a moment, about how this one distinguishing characteristics of successful school children changes, profoundly, everything we think we know about the educational process.

The problem with education in America is that we have a burgeoning population of American mothers and fathers who live under a stifling blanket of hopelessness and powerlessness. These men and women are effectively disenfranchised and no longer believe in the American Dream for themselves or for their children. As a result, they do not stress the importance of education to their children and they make little if any effort to prepare their children for learning; they offer no support to the educators of their children and, in fact, view their children’s teachers and principals as adversaries; and, finally, more often than not, they have lost control over their children and can no longer claim status as the guiding influence in the daily lives of their sons and daughters.

We have two challenges if we wish to secure any semblance of a competitive advantage for the U.S. as we proceed through the balance of the Twenty-first Century.

1. The first is that we must utilize every resource at our disposal to pull parents into the process as fully participating partners in the education of their sons and daughters. It is the absence of this partnership that results in the lowest level of motivation to learn on the part American children in generations.
2. The second is that we must be willing to admit that our current educational process is poorly structured to get the results we so desperately need to achieve. It is a system that is focused on failure and that sets the overwhelming majority of students up for failure and humiliation simply because it sets all children out on the same academic path, regardless of the cavernous disparity in the preparation they bring to their first day of school, and it judges their performance against that of their classmates.

The first challenge is formidable because it demands that we strive to change the culture of American society to one in which the American dream is real and achievable, if not for every man and woman in the nation, at least for their children.

The second challenge offers no excuses for failure because each and every school corporation in America has the authority to change the educational process by decree. That we choose to continue our practice of stumbling around in the dark is nothing short of malpractice and it places our entire future as a society in jeopardy.

I invite you and your readers to check out my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge of Twenty-First Century America. What you will find is a different approach to the challenge of identifying and then rectifying the problems with education. We offer a business approach but not in the way you might think.

What businesses do not do is rush headlong into the fray implementing unproven solutions to their most challenging problems. With their focus on customer satisfaction, businesses seek practical solutions to real life problems, aggressively but not recklessly. If we are not getting the outcomes we seek, we search for alternate solutions. To paraphrase the wisdom of Zig Ziglar, if “you keep doing what you’ve been doing you’re going to keep getting what you’ve been getting.”

Businesses also understand that we must structure our production processes to get the outcomes we seek. Tinkering with a dysfunctional process will create nothing but disappointing outcomes. What is needed is a systems-thinking approach in which we examine the educational process as an integral whole, identify what it is we want to accomplish, and then re-design or, if you will, reinvent the process to produce the desired outcomes.

In Reinventing Education, Hope and the American Dream I walk the reader through this systems-thinking process, systematically.

I also invite you and your readers to visit my blog THE LEADer (Thinking Exponentially: Leadership, Education, and the America Dream). This blog was created to explore the cultural challenges we face as we strive to re-instill faith and home in the American dream.

“Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream” a review by Grady Harp, a Top 50 Reviewer

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‘Our goal is to re-infuse faith and hope in the American Dream into the hearts and minds of every American parent and child.’, October 31, 2013

This review is from: Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America (Kindle Edition)

Mel Hawkins opens his impressive while staggeringly factual book REINVENTING EDUCATION, HOPE AND THE AMERICAN DREAM with the following words: ‘The world is in the midst of unprecedented economic, political, cultural, technological, sociological, and ecological changes that will forever transform human society. One of the drivers of American preeminence has been our systems of public education that gave the United States the most well-educated and productive workforce on the planet. As we enter the second decade of the Twenty-first Century, the U.S. is like a professional sports franchise that has seen the quality of its player development program languish over a period of years. That our competitors in the international arena are placing the education of their children at the top of their priority list while the American educational system remains a relic of times past has tragic consequences for Americans and our way of life.’ He quietly states facts, that millions of Americans have become disenfranchised and have lost hope in the American dream, given up on finding meaningful employment, accepted the fact that they and their children have little access to quality healthcare, and ‘they are chewed up and spit out by the American educational process’ – education becoming a ticket to nowhere.

The fortunate aspect of his observations is that Hawkins believes that since our educational system is the failing nidus of our current dismay, then addressing our educational system to correct the flaws provides a pathway for changing many of the frustrating, even terrifying aspects of our current status. A first objective is to alter our educational system to focus on success, on that prepares your youth for the unique challenges of living in the 21st century. Another pathway is to study and diagnose why our students are underperforming, and when that knowledge is available to us we must re-think our current status and use of system of education to unite Americans and re-infuse faith and hope in the American Dream. He is against compulsory education: our youths value the things they choose, not the things fostered upon them in an arbitrary and hap-hazard manner. If learning were the true goal of schools, common sense would tell us to evaluate current status and build from there. As one critic phrased it, ‘all work is honorable and all humans are uniquely designed to function in ways that benefit the entire society. The student who likes to tinker with machines and is not at all interested in literature should not be held in less esteem at school than the lit student. The larger social system will value some skills more than others and will obviously pay more for those skills, but the culture has to find a way to communicate to its young that the guy that gets your plumbing right enhances the quality of your life just as much as the mayor of your city.’ Hawkins mentions some of the ‘causes’ for our current failed educational system – poverty, bad teachers, outdated facilities and technology, curriculum, race and ethnicity, student behavior, fractured families – and lets us know that the facts that must be examined to change our current system are Compulsory education and the fact that unmotivated students are allowed to be a disruptive influence on students who want to learn and teachers who are striving to teach, Teacher accountability and the trust between teachers and parents, The way we structure our schools and group children in classrooms, together, The way we identify an educational path for our children and then direct them down that path, The way we utilize teachers and facilitate their ability to teach and interact with students and their parents, Our current educational system’s focus on failure, Protecting children from humiliation, Homework, practice, and the manner in which we deal with the mistakes our students make, The way we assess a student’s level of competency over the subject matter within the context of educational standards, The allocation of scarce resources to serve our mission to the optimal advantage, and The effectiveness with which we utilize the technology of the Twenty-first Century. ‘We must involve the entire community.’

This is one of the more important books to be released this year and certainly MUST be read by all who have fears of the current status of our educational system. This book is a brilliant achievement.

Another 5 Star Review for Reinventing Education Hope and the American Dream!

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An invaluable resource for anyone with an interest or passion in improving education., October 28, 2013
By
Jay Mittener
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America (Kindle Edition)
This book “Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America” is nothing short of brilliant. This book is exactly what everyone needs to read and understand about the state and future of our nation. Our standards of living, our income potential, our successes and ability to advance on life are all directly related to the education we received in this country.

It’s very eye opening and honestly very scary to see how little education is valued in today’s society and the reasons behind it. We are a nation who have slowly lost faith in our own systems and in our own ideals and truths. We are no longer seeing ourselves as a land of opportunity because we were not given, and we are not giving our children the educational tools needed to realize the American dream.

Hawkins is brilliant- He is saying the hard things, he is opening eyes and he is doing it in a way that is logical, easy to understand and will incite a passion in you to change the way we view education and it’s importance in this nation.

A must-read for parents, teachers and all those involved in improving the state of education

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A Review of Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, on Amazon.com by Thalia:

“Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America’, by Mel Hawkins, provides a critical look at the current state of education in America and follows through with innovative, inspired and crucial steps to reviving the standard of education in American and, thereby, reinvigorating the future of its workforce and the standard of living throughout the nation. Hawkins argues that the current state of matters must be tackled with `unprecedented urgency’, otherwise America’s very way of life will be jeopardized, with its stint as the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world likely to end.

Hawkins explains that education in America has lost its relevancy, with citizens no longer seeing it as `the ticket to the American Dream’. Therefore, education is no longer deemed as important as it once was and, because of this, many children are not infused with this knowledge by their parents, which has a roll-on effect to their levels of motivation and abilities to withstand peer pressures and, ultimately, their levels of academic success.

This is particularly concerning as, through research and data analysis, Hawkins shows us that motivation alone (or lack thereof) to learn is the predominant factor which influences the success of a child in reaching their full capabilities (not race, parental income levels, teacher skill or other such factors which are usually associated with variances in levels of academic success).

Therefore, Hawkins advises that the education system must be overhauled to create a reality where children are motivated to learn and every child ‘succeeds’ (because all success is relative). In order to do so, however, people must be challenged to change their basic assumptions about the way children are educated. They must recognize how kids learn (through encouragement) and do their utmost to both motivate and support them so that they are always working at the edge of their own capabilities. Of course, this entails changing the current class structures and increasing the teacher to student ratio, if students are to be working alongside one another at different levels, but Hawkins outlines smart and practical solutions to making this system workable.

What I like most about Hawkins approach (and what separates this from other educational reference texts) is that he recognizes that more qualified teachers, better facilities, better materials and better technology in classrooms are not the solution to what has become an entrenched and festering crisis. Educational performance can only be remarkably improved if the current widespread symptoms of hopelessness and powerlessness are counteracted with a surge in motivation for education, which can only be achieved by a joint effort between parents and teachers, administrators and principals, and government and public figures, to name a few.

The only thing missing for me were the graphs/figures which were not displayed in the kindle version (perhaps as I have an older kindle, images were replaced with an icon of a camera). However, the data I assume these figures displayed was adequately discussed and analysed in the text, therefore it did not really take away from the text, more that these may have added that something extra.” [Editor’s note: the graphs are visible on most devices.]

“This handbook is particularly useful for parents, teachers, support staff and school administrators who work with American children. From a wider perspective, it is valuable in supporting children in general to become their best selves, hence this book is an invaluable source of information to all who play a role in children’s education.”

Our Current Educational Process Ignores the Way Children Learn

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The following is the text of my comment to a blog post by Diane Ravitch. The subject of the post was a response from one of her readers, “a Professor of Neurology, Pediatrics and Psychiatry,” who suggested that “all of the initiatives of the last nearly 15 years, not only Common Core, are failing also because they ignore the brains of developing children and all learning theories relevant to education.”

The Professor is correct that the failure of educational reforms over the last fifteen years results, in part, because the educational process does not take into consideration the way children learn. I would add that this problem has gone on for far longer than the last fifteen years in both private and public education.

The current educational process, in public schools throughout the US does a poor job of assessing where a child is when they arrive for their first day of school re: their developmental readiness for learning and understanding academic subject matter. We then compound the problem by starting students off at the same point of embarkation and expecting them all to move from lesson to lesson at the same speed and proficiency. This process sets children up for failure and humiliation because they are pushed ahead to material for which they are poorly prepared. As children experience failure, it begins to affect their self-esteem and makes learning a stress-filled process rather than something that is both natural and fun. With each new lesson that teachers are expected to present, the students find themselves further behind until their little minds begin to shut down. Learning has ceased being fun and children begin to think of themselves as failures. Children are very much like the rest of us in that, as soon as we realize we can never win the game we decide not to play. In the case of children in school, they are no longer willing to try.

It is correct that our focus on testing in much of present day public education has exacerbated the problem but we have been teaching children the same way for generations in our public schools. We seem more concerned with the pace at which children learn rather than whether or not they actually do learn.

If we stop to think about how young children learn anything, they do it at their own unique pace, applying trial and error in an environment that is totally supportive, non-threatening, and in which failure is not even contemplated. Learning to walk and riding a bike provide helpful examples. What matters is not how quickly they learn but that they do learn and, within a short time, children are able to demonstrate the comparable levels of proficiency. The fact that the process of mastering the skill was easier and happened more quickly for some students is totally inconsequential.

In my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, I show the reader how our current educational process chews children up and spits them out. I suggest an alternate approach. It is an approach that allows children to commence from their unique starting point and to progress, from lesson to lesson, at their own pace. The focus is on success and what matters is that every child progresses along their unique learning continuum as far as they are able. As a child experiences success, we can begin to raise our expectations for them.

Our objective is not that all children arrive at the same place at the end of twelve years of formal education rather it is that what they learn they can actually apply as they proceed through the balance of their lifetimes; lifetimes that are nothing more than an extended learning continuum, unique to each individual.

Can We Really Blame Bush and Obama for the Problems in American Public Education?

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In a recent post on Diane Ravitch’s blog a reader suggests that “It will take years, maybe decades to recover from the mess Bush and Obama have generated in our schools.”

To blame Bush and Obama for ruining education is like trying to blame the EPA for the polluted lake they were striving to clean up. What we have been doing for the last fifty years, both in terms of business as usual and also in terms of a half century’s worth of failed reforms, are the things that led us to our status as a second class educational system.  The way we should approach our current challenge is something that teachers, more than anyone, should understand. When something doesn’t work, we do not blame someone for trying rather we strive to understand how and why what they did failed to work. In other words, we need to learn from our mistakes.

Think of the scientific principle. We develop a hypothesis and then we test it. Based upon what we learn from the outcomes of our efforts we make adjustments in our hypothesis and then we try again, repeating the process until we are able to consistently predict the results of our efforts.

Imagine what the world would be like today if, throughout the history of mankind, we blamed people for their failures and chose to cling to past practices rather than trying something new. Had that been the protocol of historical man, we would now be living in an extended version of the stone age.

The reason why education as evolved into the a system where an unacceptable number of children fail is  because we have spent the last fifty years trying to make incremental improvements in a technology that has become obsolete. This is what educational professionals have done and this is what policy makers have been doing whether their backgrounds are in education or business.

If the reader will pardon another historical metaphor, imagine if we were still striving to make incremental improvements in horse-driven transportation technology.

I do not envision that privatizing education can get us where we need to be but that does not mean that business principles are irrelevant when addressing the problems of education in America. What happens in business is that the world in which our customers live and conduct business is undergoing relentless and often revolutionary change. For a supplier to be successful, they must take the time to understand what has changed in our customer’s business environment and find new solutions for them. More often than not this means replacing rather that re-working old technology. Failure to understand and effectively respond to ever-changing customer expectations means loss of market share followed by business failure.

What we must understand about this Twenty-first Century is that the playing field in which the United States must compete is undergoing relentless, radical, and transformational change. In response to these changes, our competitors are leaping into the future where they are finding new and innovative ways to respond to these changes. In the meantime, Americans trudge along, yearning for the good old days that are forever lost to us.

The reality in Twenty-first Century America is that our educational process is failing to produce the kind of results necessary to compete in the international marketplace and if we don’t figure out what to do about it right now, the golden era of the United States of America, once the richest, most innovate, and productive nation in the history of the world, will grind to a sudden and unpleasant halt.

I encourage the reader to check out my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America in order to understand how to utilize a systems-thinking approach. Only through such an approach will we be able to challenge our fundamental assumptions about the educational process and then re-engineer the system to do what we so desperately need it to do.

The one certainty facing us is that, should we fail to transform our systems of education, both public and private, in fifty years China and other developing nations of the world will be looking to the U.S. for their supply of cheap labor because that is all the American people will be qualified to provide.