Category Archives: Current Affairs

“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.

Shutdown Subverts Democratic Principles!

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Forget, for a moment, how you feel about the Affordable Care Act. Forget about what you think about the national debt, government spending, entitlements for the disadvantaged, national defense, public education or protecting the environment. All of these issues are important, but not one is anywhere near as important as what you think about the principles of democracy in a world where powerful men and women can force a government shutdown to get what they want.

The underlying premise of the Constitution was to prevent the powerful from usurping the will of the people just because they have the power to do so. The Constitution was meant to protect the American people from despotism under any guise, even in the disguise of elected officials who strive to exert their will when they disagree with a decision that was lawfully and constitutionally determined. Make no mistake; forcing a government shutdown is an act of despotism.

Imagine a future in which the tactics displayed today by a political minority become the accepted way of conducting the business of the people. How long will our right to vote matter in a world in which powerful men and women can disregard the voice of the people and use coercion to get what they want?

Letter to the Editor, Fort Wayne Journal Gazette

October 7, 2013

MEL HAWKINS Fort Wayne

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.

The Failure of Public Education and Poverty: Symptoms of the Same Pathology

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In a recent post on the Blog of Diane Ravitch, she talked about Michael Petrilli’s assertion that education can solve the problem of poverty.

It is my belief that understanding the relationship between poverty and the problems of our systems of education is crucial to fixing education.

Michael Petrilli’s assertion that education can fix poverty may have a ring of truth to it but for reasons other than those that he offers. What is incorrect is to suggest, as many do, that there is a causal relationship between poverty and the problems of public education in America.  Clearly one is influenced by the other and vice versa but that is as far as it goes.

In my new book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, I suggest that poverty, deteriorating neighborhoods, the failure of so many American children, bad schools, and burned out teachers are all symptoms of the same underlying pathology. That we do not recognize the true nature of the relationship contributes greatly to the failure of educational reforms over the past half century.

I suggest that race has nothing to do with this failure but culture is another matter, entirely. There is a expanding population of American men and women who have lost faith and hope in the American dream and no longer believe that they possess control over the outcomes in their lives. These Americans reside under a blanket of hopelessness and powerlessness. What has happened as this cultural phenomenon has evolved since the end of World War II, is that an increasingly more pervasive cultural disdain for education has emerged and it transcends race.

Whatever the ethnicity of a subculture that is characterized by this disdain for education, children in these communities are not taught to value education and are not reared in an environment that would foster a strong motivation to learn. In a time when the American dream has become meaningless, an education, which for generations has been viewed as a pass of admission to the dream, is now a ticket to nowhere.  The children from these cultural pockets throughout much of urban America, and in some rural communities, arrive for their first day of school with precious little motivation to learn an even less preparation. There, they are greeted by a system that is poorly equipped to respond to the challenges that these students present and by educators who are as much victims of the system as are their students.  For huge numbers of these children our educational process sets them up for failure and humiliation and figuratively chews them up and spits them out.

That teachers and their principals are bewildered that these children are disruptive, earn failing grades and disappointing scores on state competency exams is, itself, bewildering.  One wonders how intelligent men and women could ever be persuaded to expect anything else.  Pleas to parents for help and support are shunned by men and women who, themselves, are products of the same educational process. The expectations of these parents are that schools exist to keep the kids out of their hair for five days a week and they resent the intrusion.

In Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream, I reject the conventional wisdom about the reasons for the academic failure of a growing percentage of American children and offer an alternative hypothesis. I suggest that the problems with education in the U.S. are 1) this burgeoning disdain for education on the part of parents and the resulting lack of motivation on the part of their children, and 2) an educational process that is focused on failure. The very fact that children can fail contributes greatly to a reality in which so very many of them do.

The book then outlines 19 specific action strategies for reinventing the educational process to one in which children are taught how to succeed within the context of ever-rising expectations followed by 14 action strategies for re-packaging and reselling the American dream and then re-engaging parents as full partners with the teachers and principals; sharing responsibility for the education of their children.  The book is available at this website www.melhawkinsandassociates.com where you can learn more about the book and also where you can explore my blog, THE LEADer, (Thinking Exponentially: Leadership, Education, and the American Dream)

 

A Healthcare Story: A Health Insurance Victim

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A young woman in Indiana, twenty-eight years of age, seemed poised for a good life. She liked her job in a small professional office where she was respected for her consistent performance. She enjoyed the people with whom she worked and she was engaged to be married, in only a few months, to a young man with whom she was thoroughly in love. Life was happy, busy, and could hardly have been better so she paid little attention when she experienced occasional dizziness and a slight numbness in her left arm and leg. These symptoms were followed by blurred vision and headaches and, at the urging of her family and her fiancée, she went to her doctor.

Although she had no health insurance—her employer was a small business and offered no employee benefits—her physician was able to arrange for a stream of increasingly more sophisticated and more expensive diagnostic procedures and, a referral to a neurologist. The diagnosis was Multiple Sclerosis. By this time the young woman’s symptoms had progressed and her physician pronounced her disabled and unable to work. Reluctantly she quit her job—at that time she truly was unable to perform her duties–and applied to Social Security for a disability.

After a lengthy process, during which her symptoms began to abate, the application for disability was rejected by Social Security. Although she felt much better, and was able to return to work, she was told that the MS symptoms might recur and could be even more debilitating. She was now a twenty-nine year old woman whose life was not so promising. She was unemployed, thousands of dollars in debt, and lived with the fear her health could deteriorate at any time. Her fiancée had stuck by her during the ordeal but the couple was advised to postpone their wedding, as a husband would become liable for her indebtedness. Heartbroken, frightened, discouraged and deeply in debt, she filed for bankruptcy.

Eventually she found a new job – her previous one no longer available – and although she didn’t care for the work or co-workers nearly as well as her prior job, a group health plan was offered. Unfortunately her MS was ruled as a pre-existing condition that would not be covered, at least during the first year. The monthly payroll deduction for the health insurance premium reduced her take home pay by twenty percent.

This young woman had become a victim, not only of her illness, but also of the system. The healthcare providers who took the financial risk to provide care for this patient were left with little choice but to write off a portion of the charges for their service. Although not visible to the public, costs such as these must be born by the system and they fuel the fires of medical inflation. There is no such thing as a free service, and someone, somewhere must pay.

Are Free Market Forces Good for Healthcare?

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Contrary to popular belief, the problems with the American Health Care System are not the result of market forces run amok. In fact, just the opposite is true. The American health care system languishes because the forces of the free market are unable to exert their influence. Imagine, if you will, how our free market system would look if it functioned like our health care system.

Imagine that you are sitting at home, watching television, and something feels out of sync. You can’t put your finger on what it is you are feeling but it is nagging at you and keeping you out of sorts. After a few days, the problem seems to be worsening and you are really beginning to worry. Finally, you pick up the phone and place a call to your local retail professional and make an appointment.

On the appointed day you arrive at your local mall or shopping center and you describe your symptoms to your retail professional. Your retail professional listens intently, asks a few questions, and then diagnoses your problem and offers a treatment protocol to make you feel better. Your retail professional tells you that the problem is that your home entertainment system is not meeting your minimum daily requirements. As a solution, your retail professional tells you that what you need is a new home entertainment system with state-of-the-art technology.

Now, it just so happens that you retail professional has the perfect home entertainment system to sell to you and guess what? It’s covered by your retail insurance policy. In checking your benefits it turns out that you’ve already satisfied your deductible so your insurance is going to cover eighty percent of the total cost of your new system.

What your retail professional may not explain to you is that your home entertainment system exceeds the usual and customary charges for such items so the insurance is not going cover your retail professional’s full cost. She’s not worried, however, because there are a number of accessories she can sell to you that are covered and these will more than make up for the difference.

I know this sounds a little silly, but think about how our free market economy would work if the merchants with whom we do business would decide for us what we need and how much we are going to pay, and that we would be happy to accept their decisions without question because our insurance is going to pay for the merchandise, anyway. This is exactly how the healthcare system works today and we wonder why costs continue to rise at or above the rate of the Consumer Price Index.
The problem with the American health care system is not that doctors make too much money, the problem is that the incentives in healtcare reward the wrong behavior. The problem is not that health insurance companies, managed care, Medicare or Medicaid absorb huge chunks of our health care dollar, the problem is that these entities exist at all.

Think about it for a moment. If we really want to provide universal health care what value do health insurance, managed care, Medicare and Medicaid contribute? Don’t these entities exist to restrict access to care to only those who are eligible for coverage? Don’t these entities exist to limit care to only those services that are covered by our schedule of benefits and for which we have paid?

If we want to provide comprehensive health care to all Americans we have to change the way we think about our health care system. There is a solution but it resides outside the boundaries of conventional thinking.

Visit my website atwww.melhawkinsandassociates.com and check out my book, Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System. In fact, tell all of your friends about it.

Obamacare aka the Affordable Care Act Mis-Named!

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The Affordable Care Act, affectionately or not so affectionately called Obamacare has been misnamed. It should have been called the Affordable Health Insurance Act because it addresses the issues of healthcare, only indirectly.

What Obamacare does is allow people to purchase health insurance coverage for themselves and their families. “Allow” is not the right word, however, as the law is set up with penalties for families who do not enroll in a health insurance plan within a designated time frame.

The types of health insurance coverage that will be available to people will vary as each individual or family will be shopping for coverage that seems to best fit their unique requirements.

The ACA also asks health insurance providers to incur more risk by eliminating provisions like pre-existing conditions. Apparently, it is a trade off for being assured of getting more business.

We admire the sentiment of the act, which was intended to reduce the number of Americans who are uninsured and, therefor, not able to get the medical or hospital care that they need.The logic is somewhat confounding, however.

Rather than make health care available to all Americans as a right of citizenship, as so many other nations have done, it was decided to require everyone to have health insurance. How they arrived at the next logical conclusion, which was to penalize people who are unwilling or who think themselves unable to pay for the now more readily available coverage, is somewhat of a mystery.

The problem with Obamacare is that it will commit our nation to a future in which we are tied to the health insurance industry. Almost certainly, the people of other developed nations must be shaking their heads in bewilderment at those crazy Americans. I’m sure they must be asking themselves why we think it a good idea to do business with a middle man who only adds cost and complexity to the process of delivering needed healthcare to people.

It is hard to come up with a comparison that illustrates the absurdity of the concept but here’s an example that at least comes close.

Earlier I used the example of fire protection for citizens and asked the reader to imagine a scenario where the fire department pulls up to your burning home and asks to see your fire insurance card before they will turn on their hoses.

In most communities in the U.S., people have determined that everyone deserves fire protection and that the community will pay for that protection with tax dollars.

I have heard of a few communities where citizens are asked to pay a direct fee for fire protection. Now imagine that, in these latter communities, a problem has developed because not everyone is willing to or can afford to pay the fee for their fire protection. This theoretical community could decide to solve the problem the way most American communities have, by paying for fire protection with local tax dollars even if this initially requires an increase in property tax rates, the adoption of some type of local option income tax, or even some type of earmarked sales tax. Whatever the method of taxation, these communities have made fire protection a right of citizenship.

Now, lets consider that there is another community that still requires individual property owners to pay a separate fee for fire protection and that this community is also concerned that not everyone seems willing to pay for fire protection. The leaders of this community are not willing, however, to make fire protection a right of citizenship in their community.

Instead, someone comes up with the idea that requires insurance companies to provide at least a minimal level of fire protection coverage, no matter what the condition of individual properties, and also requires all citizens to purchase fire protection insurance coverage or pay a penalty.

Now, it is difficult to imagine that any community would choose such an approach because common sense would dictate that it will almost certainly cost more to pay a middle man for fire protection insurance than it would be to pay for it directly, through tax revenue. After all, the middle man has to cover their operating costs and, because we live in a free market society, make a profit.

Why is it that so many Americans seem so wrapped up in their daily activities and challenges that they are unable to step back and think about what they are doing and why?