Tag Archives: public schools

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.

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.

Disenfranchisement and Hopelessness

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What does it mean to be disenfranchised? What does disenfranchisement have to do with Hopelessness?

The most common use of the term disenfranchised has been associated with the right to vote. People who are disenfranchised are not permitted to participate in their own governance. More generally, it could refer to the loss or denial of any of the civil liberties to which a free people are entitled, under the law. Typically, when we say that someone is disenfranchised we are talking about people from whom something has been taken away.

We have chosen to expand the term to include people who have essentially disenfranchised themselves. These are individuals who no longer believe that what they do, think, or say matters to their community, their nation, or society. In this case, disenfranchisement is a voluntary abdication of one’s responsibility to participate in one’s own governance. This type of disenfranchisement flows from hopelessness.

Human beings experience hopelessness when they no longer believe they have control over their own destiny or over the outcomes in their lives. Literally tens of millions of people, in this great nation of ours, have lost hope. They no longer believe that the American people, as a whole, care about them. They no longer believe that anyone is interested in listening to their complaints of woe let alone take action to address those complaints. They no longer believe in the “American Dream.”

It is easy for the rest of us to shout out in pious righteousness that these people need to do something for themselves but, literally, these people do not see anything they can do. That’s what it means to be powerless. Hopelessness and powerlessness are so closely intertwined that it is almost impossible to distinguish one from the other.

We tell them to get a job, but there are no jobs for them that will enable them to support their families. They can work somewhere for minimum wage but no employer is going to give them a sufficient number of hours per week that would obligate the employer to offer benefits. They can make a better living on Welfare. The argument that Welfare offers no advancement opportunities is meaningless to people who cannot envision something better. We must be able to envision if we are to believe.

When faced with serious injury or illness of a family member, the disenfranchised know that the American people are prepared to let them suffer. They know that every other developed nation in the world, apart from “the land of the free and the brave,” has addressed this issue of access to healthcare. Americans, however, steadfastly refuse to provide healthcare to all Americans. Even when the President of the United States has pushed through healthcare reform legislation in the form of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), however imperfect, the opposition attacks it relentlessly. The message that the disenfranchised hear, loudly and clearly, is that the majority of Americans “do not want us to have quality medical care for our families nor are they willing to pay for that care.”

Mainstream Americans are frustrated that so many people have become dependent on the government for welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. We cry out, “What more do you want?” We do not understand why these people express resentment rather than gratitude.

When, in the face of our staggering national debt, all the disenfranchised hear from those in power are proposals to cut food stamps, welfare benefits, or other entitlement programs; why would they feel anything other than resentment?

What Americans need to wake up to is the idea that this reality with which we are confronted is a consequence of decisions we have made over the last seventy years. We created this monster called welfare. It was intended to make sure that poor mothers could care for their children but the reality is that it succeeded only in trapping huge populations of Americans in a reality that is little more than second-class citizenship.

It used to be that even the poorest of the poor would see an education as a ticket out of poverty and as a stepping stone to the American Dream. In most urban communities, the disenfranchised no longer believe in education as a ticket to anywhere other than free day care. What they know is that huge percentages of their children are failing in a school system that is also second class. When we offer voucher programs to help families put their children in better schools we are sending a subtle but powerful message that America has given up on urban public schools.

The fact is that the only parents that take advantage of vouchers are people who still cling to hope and some vestige of the American Dream. The other significant fact is that unless the parents who opt to take advantage of vouchers are also willing to accept responsibility as partners in the education of their children and ferociously encourage their sons and daughters to work hard at school these kids will be no more successful in their new schools than they were in their old ones. Many “charter schools” and other schools that admit “voucher children” to their classrooms are finding this out as they see their school’s declining scores on state competency exams.

So, let’s think about this for a moment. We have an expanding population of poor Americans who:
• Are third- or fourth-generation beneficiaries of welfare
• Cannot gain access to anything more than the minimal level of healthcare for their children and little or no healthcare for themselves,
• Who cannot find jobs that pay better than minimum wage and that offers enough hours to qualify for benefits,
• Who see their children fall so far behind in school that “failure” seems inevitable, and
• Who hear elected officials and policy makers demand that we cut entitlement programs rather than increase taxes paid by the wealthy and the middle class.

Why in the world would we expect these men and women to believe in an American Dream that is nothing more than an illusion for them and an empty promise for their children?

Welfare and other programs that teach people to be dependent rather than independent and interdependent are a cancer that is eating away the heart and soul of our nation.

We must acknowledge, as we move further into the Twenty-first Century, that the policies that got us into this mess are incapable of getting us out. We desperately need new ideas and new solutions. We need to think exponentially and challenge all of our assumptions about the way our society provides for the poor, takes care of the sick, and educates our children.

How much longer can we expect working men and women of our nation to continue to carry the burden of a burgeoning population of poor and disenfranchised people on one end of the productivity continuum, and population of retirees that is growing at an unprecedented rate on the other? What happens to our status as the leader of the free world when our economy buckles under the oppressive weight of the retired and the dispossessed?

In a few weeks, I will be introducing my latest book entitled, Re-inventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge of the Twenty-First Century. It is a book that offers a strategic action plan to address major components of the dilemma in which we find ourselves. In this book, I suggest that our systems of education, both public and private, offer the best hope for attacking the problems we face as a society and for bringing the disenfranchised back into a game in which their contributions are desperately needed.

My book Radical Surgery: Reconstructing the American Health Care System, published in 2002, already offers a solution for providing universal healthcare and prescription drugs at a price that we can afford; and, in a way that relies on free market forces, not government, to drive quality, cost, and accountability.

Many people have branded Radical Surgery, sight unseen, as just another proposal for socialized medicine. If they would set aside their prejudices and open the book they would learn that Radical Surgery rejects socialized medicine and offers another alternative. It is an alternative, however, that requires that we open our minds to a whole new way of thinking about healthcare.

Implementation of the very specific strategies offered in these two books, Re-Inventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream and Radical Surgery, will provide a realistic opportunity to re-engage the disengaged members of our community. The consequence of seeing this population continue to grow will be nothing short of apocalyptic, which is what my novel, Light and Transient Causes, has been written to illustrate.