View 339 December 6 - 12, 2004 (original) (raw)
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Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Still recovering from getting the column done.
Bob Thompson has a project in mind :
Subject: Measuring educational success
I'd be interested to learn what you think of my 11:36 post today.
-- Robert Bruce Thompsonthompson@ttgnet.com
http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
which is interesting, although he sets his sights far too high in my judgment. No reason not to include questions to sort the high end from the low if you are trying to assess general competence, but some of his questions are quite specialized. I may once have known something of the history of photography, but I have only a vague idea of what Daguerreotypes were and I only spelled that correctly because Word's default dictionary has that word in it.
Thompson mentions the report of the National Commission on Education, Glenn T. Seaborg, Chairman, which delivered its report in 1983, opening with these words:
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.... the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and as a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur- others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.... We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
I copied that from Seaborg's essay written on the 10th Anniversary of the original report http://teidnt3.lbl.gov/seaborg/risk.htm which looks at the Commission's recommendations and what has been done to implement them. Seaborg attempts to put a good face on things, but the fact is that he could have written the original report on its 10th Anniversary without much modification.
The public schools in the US are in the hands of a bureaucracy that has forgotten the purpose of public schools. With some notable and laudable exceptions, our schools no longer even attempt to "educate" students; instead, they provide credentials. Success is measured not in the accomplishments of the students as they become citizens, but in the numbers of credentials that can be provided; and in the averages of test scores.
Now there is nothing wrong with the notion of using tests to measure effectiveness of instruction, but one needs to give some thought to what is meant by effectiveness.
Our schools are required "to leave no child behind." What this means in practice is that much effort is put into seeing that those in the bottom quadrant of intellectual capability are raised up to meet a standard; while those at the top are given little attention because they will get an average or better score on the tests. If true averages were used there might be a chance that some teachers would go for a strategy of getting a lot of very high marks -- Jaime Escalante comes to mind -- and that high average would be noticed and lauded and used to raise averages. What's usually done, though, is cutoffs, and reports on how many students met a minimum standard.
If that's your goal, that no child be left behind, you have set yourself a very difficult task, and one that may not have very great beneficial results. Getting everyone in the class to have a C average, so that there are none with B's and A's, may not produce a very competitive work force. Of course there will be high achieving students, even in the public schools; some are bright enough to figure out the system and learn things on their own. As a product of the general kind of school through 8th Grade I can testify that, given some encouragement by the teachers who have no real time for individual kids (we had two grades to the room and 30 or so kids per grade), you can learn a lot by reading books. However, I don't think I would have got much of an education had that continued: it took the systematic work and high expectations of the Christian Brothers at CBC in Memphis to make me actually get a decent education and even there I have some holes in my knowledge, at least according to Mr. Thompson's proposed test. I have not the foggiest notion of the contributions of those people to photography, and although I certainly knew it at one time, it would take me a while to lay out all the categories of the Linnaean taxonomy from memory (although I could find them in a matter of minutes).
If the goal of education is that no child be left behind, then the way to achieve that is to put all the attention on the low end of the intellectual spectrum, since the higher end will take care of itself. I repeat, this may not be an optimum strategy for a wealthy republic, since it is unlikely to turn out highly competitive workers.
The very high end of the spectrum, and the children of the wealthy, will not face this problem, of course. But if ever there were a system devised to make class structure more rigid, a system of education that tries to raise the averages but ignores the top end -- yet allows the wealthy to opt out of that system entirely -- is it. Indeed, our system is so cleverly designed to produce hewers of wood and drawers of water at the expense of teaching "high normal" children to be competitive that one wonders if it were not planned that way; if this isn't the intention, what would we do differently if it were the intention?
Mr. Thompson's plan to devise a test for general competency and try to raise the bar is useful only if the notion is to see how many we can get to meet that standard -- at the expense of leaving behind those who are unable, or unwilling, to climb that high.
And that, I put it to you, will not happen.
The trouble with democracy is that it tends to pull everyone to a common level: great men cannot rise to their proper level. This was known by Cicero and once known to almost every intellectual in Western Civilization. Now we don't have a Western Civilization, and to the extent that we do our intellectuals are mostly ashamed of it; and while the last thing our Enlightened class wants is real equality, the notion of "equal treatment" is now pervasive. Why would it not be? The official view of man as taught in almost every classroom in the nation is Jacobinism, Rousseau, "Man is born free yet he is everywhere in chains," and the rest of it. Why are we then surprised when a great many people act as if they believe that?
The Framers knew better. The Founders knew better. The notion that within most human hearts beats a burning desire to take his neighbors goods and possess his wife was prevalent. As Chesterton observed, one needs only to read the newspapers to confirm the doctrine of Original Sin. One need not be religious to come to the view that to secure rights governments must be instituted among men. But when the notion of rights, and I'm as good as you and I got to have my rights same as anyone becomes the pervasive public doctrine, there are bound to be consequences.
The original formulation of the Commission's key sentence was written by Annette Kirk better known perhaps as Mrs. Russell Kirk: "If a foreign nation had imposed this system of education on the United States, we would rightly consider it an act of war." It was watered down to "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Either way, though, it is entirely true; and of the changes made since that was written, only a few can be viewed as bettering the education system; while the power of the unions, bureaucrats, gatekeepers, and credential mills have made things far worse.
Mr. Thompson notes:
I wasn't, as you suggest, aiming this test at the right end of the curve, nor does your ignorance of the history of photography count much against you. In my opinion, if the schools were doing their job, an average high-school graduate would do reasonably well on such a test. As I said in my post, "a well-educated person should be able to respond credibly, if not definitively, to at least half the questions on the test."
I don't disagree; I do think the expectation for normal -- IQ 95 - 105 -- is a bit high but not excessively so. The real problem for the schools is that some students need "education" in the sense of learning how to learn, and don't need a lot of drills and training; while some students can't benefit much from "education" but certainly can learn skills and become highly productive people. Sorting out which needs what is a primary problem, and the teaching methods for teaching skills are quite different from the teaching methods for "educating", i.e., teaching how to learn. And of course there are those who simply shouldn't be in the classrooms with the others, because they aren't going to either get an education or learn skills, yet will absorb most of the time from the instructors. If we are going to combine rigid legal rights to be in the mainstream with the "no child left behind" philosophy we guarantee that the teachers will concentrate on the poor students and let the bright ones fend for themselves. This is a way to burn out teachers fast; it's also a horrible misallocation of resources, and a formula for economic disaster.
Don't say I didn't tell you so when things really come apart. I may not survive to see us reap the whirlwind, but you will. We have sown the wind.
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Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 18:48:41 -0800
HR 5382, The Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act, just passed the US Senate by unanimous consent. Having already passed the House of Representatives, it will now go to the President for signature and at that point become law. Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who has worked toward this moment over the last year.
The lack of this law would not have been the end of the world for the emerging "alt space" industry, and the passing of it will not solve all problems from this moment on. Nevertheless, we believe that HR 5382 is a significant step forward in establishing a regulatory regime that, whether or not it's perfect, is Good Enough for this new industry to get underway with.
Thanks again, all.
Henry Vanderbilt Space Access Society space.access@space-access.org
I have considerable evidence that actions of subscribers to this web site were influential in getting the key House vote. Thanks to all of you.