Education Reform: Shaping the Future Marion Brady.

Education Reform:Shaping the Future

Marion Brady

Education Reform2

Education Reform

In America, for more than a century, efforts to reform education have never ceased.

This presentation is designed to stimulate dialog about the federally-mandated reform effort currently underway.

[The presentation is offered free, and may be used, duplicated and distributed in its original form without the express permission of the author. Excerpts must follow fair use rules, with proper credits.]

Part 1: Thirteen Problems

Education Reform4

Taking charge of education reform

In the late 1980s, state governors, business leaders and federal officials decided the performance of America’s schools was unacceptable.

A Washington-area conference was called. From that conference came a blueprint for reform called: “GOALS 2000:

STANDARDS AND MEASURES”

Education Reform5

Money from Washington began to be tied to state-level efforts to:

write educational “standards” describing exactly what students should know and be able to do

administer high-stakes tests making schools accountable for meeting the standards.

STANDARDThe student understands the world from its beginnings to the time of the Renaissance.

Which of the following took place during the Renaissance?

(a) Battle of Hastings(b) Columbus’ voyages to the Americas(c) Construction of the pyramids in Egypt(d) Founding of the Moslem religion(e) None of the above

From one state’s standards, Grade 8, social studies:

Education Reform6

“Goals 2000” is reinforced:

In 2002, in a burst of bipartisanship, Congress continued the reform effort with the “No Child Left Behind” legislation.

The initial emphasis was on improving and expanding reading and math skills, but the eventual aim was to standardize the entire curriculum.

Education Reform7

A theory:

“Goals 2000” and “No Child Left Behind” grew out of a theory about the cause of unacceptable school performance.

Students and teachers were performing poorly, it was supposed, either because they(a)didn’t know what to do, or(b)were unwilling or unable to do it.

Education Reform8

According to this theory…

…poor performance is a “people problem,” not a “system problem.”

And introducing competition will solve the problem.

Education Reform9

Americans share a deep-seated faith in the problem-solving power of market forces.

For the education system to yield maximum performance, it’s believed, competition should pit…

Student against student Teacher against teacher School against school System against system State against state Nation against nation

Education Reform10

To support and enhance competition, it’s believed to be necessary to…

Test constantly Publicize performance statistics Hold failure up to public shame Heap praise or money on the

successful Threaten failure with school

closure, job loss, privatization, and so on.

Education Reform11

An alternative theory

Are the politicians and business leaders right? Should most of the blame for poor school performance be placed on teachers and students?

Respected management experts think poor performance usually indicates not a “people problem” but a “system problem.”

Education Reform12

System Problems

School systems have many elements—procedures for sorting students, staffing, scheduling, monitoring performance, imposing discipline, maintaining infrastructure and so on. Each element is a potential problem area.

But schooling, first of all, is about what’s taught and learned. This means that the most important system element in schooling is

Education Reform13

sciencemathematicssocial studieslanguage arts

These are considered “basic.”

Education Reform14

Trying to improve instruction in math, science, social studies and language arts, it’s easy to forget that those fields of study aren’t what the curriculum is all about.

School subjects are mere means to an end – the end of making more sense of self, of others, of the world, of experience, of life.

Education Reform15

Bureaucratic inertia may . . .

. . .keep a school system “going through the motions” of educating. But if the curriculum isn’t, moment by moment, helping students make more sense of life, they will intuitively reject it.

Education Reform16

The curriculum and life:

“Making more sense of life” means making more sense of immediate experience, more sense of the real world, right here, right now. It means making more sense, say, of buying a pair of socks.

Education Reform17

Making more sense of life:

We want a pair of socks. Those available have been knitted in a third world country.

Education Reform18

Making sense of life:

Power to run the knitting machines is supplied by burning fossil fuels:

Education Reform19


Burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming.

Education Reform20


Global warming alters weather patterns.

Education Reform21


Altered weather patterns trigger environmental catastrophes.

Education Reform22


Environmental catastrophes destroy infrastructure.

Education Reform23


Money spent for infrastructure replacement isn’t available for health care.

Education Reform24


Declines in the quality of health care affect mortality rates.

Education Reform25


Mortality is a matter of life and death.

Education Reform26


Buying socks, then, is a matter of life and death.

Education Reform27

The curriculum as system problem

Buying a pair of socks is simple. Ordinary. Routine.

But making sense of it (which is what the curriculum is supposed to help us do) turns out to require, at the very least, some understanding of marketing, physics, chemistry, meteorology, economics, engineering, psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology…

Education Reform28


…And it requires an understanding of the relationships between these fields of knowledge.

Education Reform29


Making sense of experience requires the seamless weaving together of knowledge. When fields of study are walled off from each other with awkward, artificial, arbitrary boundaries, our brains are denied, in real and immediate ways, access to the raw materials essential for productive thought.

Education Reform30

The curriculum’s denial of the integrated nature of knowledge is only one of its many inadequacies. Here are 12 more:

It has no agreed-on, overarching aim.

It emphasizes the single mental process of recall to the neglect of the whole range of complex thought processes that real-world functioning requires.

It’s so inefficient it leaves little time for students to discover and develop their individual abilities and interests

It focuses attention primarily on mediated descriptions and analyses of reality rather than upon reality itself.


Education Reform31

More curriculum inadequacies:

It provides no criteria for determining the relative importance of various fields of knowledge, and of knowledge within those fields

It makes no provision for the inclusion of knowledge outside the boundaries of present disciplines

It marginalizes art, music, play and physical activity, all of which are essential to intellectual development


It assumes that students differ little in learning styles

Education Reform32

And more:

It lends undeserved respectability to standardized tests and other simplistic measures of performance that reward mere symbol manipulation ability.

Its emphasis on the absorption of “secondhand” knowledge encourages student passivity

It lacks mechanisms for adapting to inevitable social change


Education Reform33

And finally:

It disregards the brain’s need for a “master” information-organizing system.

As a consequence, the student’s short-term memory has to carry an intellectual load for which it is ill-equipped.The evidence is apparent. Most adults remember little of what they once “learned” in school.

Education Reform34

If education is important…

…to societal survival, then any one of these more than a dozen problems is serious enough to warrant Congressional hearings or the calling of a national conference. The curriculum suffers not from just one of these problems, but from all of them.

Education Reform35


The conclusion is inescapable. The traditional curriculum is unacceptable. Even the schools and universities to which we point with pride fail to give students the broad range of integrated intellectual tools necessary for thinking about even the most ordinary human experience.

Education Reform36

“American education has evolved in such a way it will be the undoing of the society.” Buckminister Fuller

Fragmented,discipline-based,specializededucation

Increasingsocietalcomplexity

Increasingsocietalfragmentation,instability &ungovernability

Witheringaway ofdemocracy

Decreasingunderstandingof systemicconsequencesof complexity

Education Reform37


The Standards and Accountability reform movement is well-intentioned. It has some defensible validity in assessing reading comprehension and math skills in elementary grades.

High-pressure tactics, its narrow focus, teaching to the test, the Hawthorne Effect, cheating, and the manipulation of statistics for political gain will result in marginal improvements in student scores on standardized tests.

But long-term, its effects will be devastating. It freezes in place the very problems with the curriculum that brought education to its present state.

Education Reform38

“Human history,”. . .

…said H. G. Wells, “is more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

If he was right, and we leave the present curriculum in place, put your money on catastrophe.

It’s a sure thing.

Part 2: A Closer Look

Education Reform40

A closer look:

We’ve identified 13 serious problems with the general education curriculum presently in place in America’s schools and universities.

And we’ve said that, if we really believe that our future hinges on the quality of education, any one of the 13 is serious enough to warrant the calling of a national conference.

Fortunately, such a conference wouldn’t have to address all 13 problems. That’s because most of them are so interconnected that solving one of them would solve many others.

Education Reform41

A closer look:

In fact, solving just three of those problems with the traditional curriculum…– its lack of an agreed-upon aim,– its failure to respect the brain’s need for order and

organization, and– its ignoring of the integrated nature of knowledge…

…would go a long way toward solving ALL the problems with the curriculum.

Education Reform42

A closer look:

Let’s consider those three curricular problems, beginning with the need for agreement about what it is we want the schools to do.

Education Reform43

Reform Problem #1: Aimlessness

Listen to the political rhetoric, listen to the speeches delivered at education-related industry conferences, and the purpose of education becomes clear. What we’re trying to do is:

ACHIEVE WORLD-CLASS STANDARDS!

Education Reform44


Or is it to…

Teach thinking skills? Prepare students for democratic citizenship? Raise standardized test scores? Introduce the core disciplines? Help students become culturally literate? Respond to student needs?

Facilitate self-actualization? Solve social problems? Build self-esteem? Pose the “eternal questions?” Enhance problem-solving skills? Instill a love of learning?

Develop character? Explore broad themes? Teach key concepts? Transmit societal values? Promote intercultural understanding? Instill virtue? Prepare students for useful, satisfying work?

(Just to begin the list…)

Education Reform45


For a system to be effective—in fact, for a system to even BE a system—all its parts have to share a purpose. For an education system to be a real system, everyone who has anything to do with its functioning—federal and state policy makers, textbook publishers, education software writers, administrators, teachers, parents, students—has to agree about the system’s purpose.

Education Reform46

No such agreement on aim exists.

When that national conference on education reform addresses Problem #1, we suggest that it consider:THE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF SCHOOLING IS TO HELP THE YOUNG MAKE MORE SENSE OF THINGS—SELF, OTHERS, AND THE WORLD AROUND THEM.

We should make that the main aim of schooling. All those other goals are peripheral.


Education Reform47

Reform Problem #2: Mental disorganization

Convinced that the whole of knowledge is intellectually unmanageable, we study it piecemeal. However, it isn’t the AMOUNT of information but its apparent randomness that makes learning difficult for students. No one knows how much information the human brain can handle IF THE INFORMATION IS ORGANIZED.

Education Reform48

Organization is essential

A system of organization—the periodic table of the elements—made it possible to predict the existence of the element germanium before it was actually discovered.

A system of organization—alphabetical ordering of names—makes it possible to find, in a matter of seconds, a phone number in a phone book.


Education Reform49


a particular book in a library, a particular kind of cereal in a supermarket, a particular car taillight in a junk yard, a particular departure gate for an airline flight, a particular spot on the face of the earth.

Systems of organization make it possible to locate:


Education Reform50

We take our systems of organization for granted,

From getting a cup from a kitchen cabinet to the most esoteric research in physics, it’s systems of organization that guide action.The better the system, the more efficient and effective the action will be.

…but it’s systems of organization that make civilization possible.


Education Reform51


From this it follows, if we want to improve something, taking a long, hard look at its system of organization is a good place to start.

We want to improve our schools. We should, then, be carefully examining the organizing systems that shape them.


Education Reform52

In schools, there are plenty of systems to examine…

…systems to: sort students assign them teachers set schedules lay out instructional programs check on individual and collective performance establish consequences for success and failure.

In short, systems of organization control the educating process from start to finish.


Education Reform53

Organizing knowledge

Unfortunately,

…the one system of organization that gets the least attention is the one that’s far and away the most important—the student’s mental system for organizing knowledge.


Education Reform54

Organizing knowledge

Then, follow the student through the school day, watching and listening, as into that library, into that supermarket, into that junkyard, a conveyor feeds a constant stream of information and dumps it in an unorganized heap.

Think of the brain as library, as supermarket, as junkyard.


Education Reform55

What we see as essential in every other dimension of daily life—

A system of organization

…is routinely ignored in the one place where it matters most:

in the mind of the student.


Education Reform56

What students need…

…is a clear understanding of the system they use for organizing general knowledge.

We’ve come to believe that the best (maybe the ONLY) system for organizing general knowledge is this:


Education Reform57

But school subjects aren’t the only system for organizing knowledge.

Here’s another:


Education Reform58

When we attempt to make sense of ordinary experience, we use these “raw materials” to sort information. Our conversations, newspaper accounts, memoranda, history books, novels, dramas, crime scene reports, hopes, dreams, fears, visions of the future—weave together just five kinds of information; information about (a) time, (b) place, (c) actors, (d) action and (e) cause.


Education Reform59

These five kinds of information…

…not the traditional school subjects and courses, are the simplest comprehensive organizers of thought and language. Describing or analyzing a particular experience, we use a kind of “systems” test. Within each of the five categories, we pay attention only to that which, if it were different, would cause the experience to be significantly different.


Education Reform60

When that national conference on education reform addresses Problem #2…

…we’d suggest that it consider:

THE CURRICULUM SHOULD BE BASED ON THE USUAL WAY WE ORGANIZE KNOWLEDGE.


Education Reform61

Reform Problem #3: Disconnected knowledge

The “standards and accountability” reform movement will fail. How could it not? It ignores the integrated nature of knowledge, and knowledge is what education is all about.All across America, at the state and local level, committees are meeting, separately, to write “standards” for math, science, social studies, language arts. That all knowledge is integrated and mutually reinforcing, and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, isn’t even being talked about.

Education Reform62


“It is a well-known scandal that our whole educational system is geared more to categorizing and analyzing patches of knowledge than to threading them together.” (Harlan Cleveland)

“Students rarely have an opportunity to discover what one set of ideas has to do with another.” (Philip Sabaratta)

“Our educational systems…are now primarily designed to teach people specialized knowledge—to enable students to divide and dissect knowledge. At the heart of this pattern of teaching is…a view of the world that is quite simply false.” (James Coomer)

Education Reform63


“All of our experience should have made it clear by now that faculty and students will not derive from a list of disjointed courses a coherent curriculum revealing the necessary interdependence of knowledge.” (Daniel Tanner)

“The division into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge. Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect.” (John I. Goodlad)

Education Reform64

Start with this:

…and the holistic, integrated, mutually reinforcing nature of knowledge will never be apparent to students.


Education Reform65

Start with these categories as the basic organizers of the curriculum:

…and the holistic, integrated, mutually reinforcing nature of knowledge will be obvious to students.


Education Reform66

A reminder:

A holistic, systemically integrated way of organizing knowledge is critically important in education because

(a) nothing else captures how the world really works, and

(b) individual and collective knowledge grow as relationships are discovered between parts of the world not previously thought to be related.


Education Reform67

Knowledge grows as relationships are discovered:

This relating process won’t work efficiently if knowledge is fragmented.


moon – tides sex ratios – perceptions of work roles Pacific ocean temperature – Atlantic hurricanes social stress – religious fundamentalism air temperature drop – heart attacks and strokes management style – worker productivity

Education Reform68

When that national conference on education reform addresses Problem #3…

…we’d suggest that it consider:

THE CURRICULUM SHOULD BE BASED ON OUR USUAL WAY OF INTEGRATING KNOWLEDGE.


Education Reform69

In summary…

Goals 2000 (Standards and Accountability), and “No Child Left Behind” are well-intentioned, and the federal dollars they funnel to schools are sorely needed.

But they are products of the conventional wisdom, and the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Education Reform70

In summary…

Buckminster Fuller said it well:

“American education has developed in such a way it will be the undoing of the society.”

“Goals 2000” and “No Child Left Behind” don’t merely fail to address the fundamental problem: a dysfunctional curriculum. Worse…

Education Reform71

By requiring…

…that states do the wrong thing more diligently, they hasten the “undoing” Fuller predicted.

On this issue… We really DO need Congressional hearings or a national conference.

Education Reform72

Marion Brady

4285 N. Indian River DriveCocoa, Florida 32937

321-636-3448

[email protected]

August 2002

Education ReformCopyright © 2002 by Marion Brady

Education Reform: Shaping the Future Marion Brady.

Documents

Transcript of Education Reform: Shaping the Future Marion Brady.