Teacher Teacher

An interesting article at Liberties Journal opens by quoting some college students lamenting the quality of instruction they were receiving. Professors were disengaged, they meandered during their lectures and frequently explained material poorly in response to student questions.

The hook is that this discussion happened almost a hundred years ago, in a meeting of delegates from 20 colleges held at Wesleyan University in 1925. To the extent today's students care about learning anything in between bacchanals and indignant protests, they could probably say similar things. A few do, says article author Jonathan Zimmerman, but those "paying customers" are widely outnumbered by the ones who want a memorable experience (much of which they will render themselves unable to remember) and a credential for a job that will put them comfortably in the upper middle class.

Zimmerman, a former professor at New York University and now at the University of Pennsylvania, names the usual suspects: A research-dominated faculty culture, little or no training in actual pedagogy, grade inflation, etc. To this he adds a feature from our modern age, in which professors are afraid to present challenging ideas in certain areas of discussion for fear of stirring up a mob against them for their clearly fascist bigotry -- even in fields that discuss nothing that could honestly be described as fascist or bigoted.

My own time as an undergraduate is some 35 years ago and while some of these trends had started to curve upward, I proudly possess a transcript that proves grade inflation had not been adopted by several professors. Most of my time in campus ministry has been in smaller regional universities, where students are far more likely to encounter instructors more interested in teaching than in advancing in their field through research. 

The irony seems to be that the value of the college as a credential for where one starts in the world seems to vary inversely with the likelihood that one might actually be taught something. Professor Zimmerman would like to see a world where more colleges offered that likelihood -- and maybe things at prestige universities or large state research schools will one day break down so much that such a world will return. It happened in response to student critique and dissatisfaction a hundred years ago, at least for awhile, and maybe it will happen again.

Testing, One, Two, Three

According to the organization Ofqual, my headline is not easily understood and might demotivate learners.

My headline has more than one potential meaning, you see. On the one hand, it's the time-honored phrase that speakers will say into a microphone as a sound technician sets audio levels. On the other hand, the word "testing" can mean many other activities. Thus, my headline uses "complex language" that could cause the aforementioned demotivation.

Kristina Murkett, writing at Unherd, goes over some of Ofqual's complaints and suggestions as they relate to national academic tests in English schools. Abstract nouns, homonyms and metaphors are also among the targets Ofqual would like to see done away with in order to make exam questions "accessible, clear and plain."

That by itself is a worthy goal -- if the questions are not clear then the answer could come from what would, to the scorer, look like left field. But if a later discussion showed that the student gathered a different meaning than the questioner intended and responded to that, then the supposed wrong answer could be seen as right.

But, Murkett notes, the goal seems to be less clarity and more dumbing down. We deal with homonyms -- words that mean different things but sound and are often spelled alike -- every day and we understand them based on their context. Although "bank" can be both a financial institution and the side of a river, I am not at all confused over which of them is a good place to put my money. The federal government, on the other hand...

The point is that understanding the question demonstrates as much mastery of the skills being measured as does the answer to it. I might have memorized the facts the class was designed to impart to me but in order to demonstrate knowledge I need to be able to put those facts into a proper context: I need to know which of them answers a particular question.

Anyway, Murkett's brief piece points out that Ofqual's proposed strategies would simply water down the exams until they were as useless as testing opponents say, except for the purpose of convincing students they are as unable to understand these things as their supposed benefactors say they are. When I'm teaching a lesson in a youth Bible study, as much as half of my work is convincing the the students that the things we're talking about are not beyond their reach. That knowledge, it would seem, they have learned well.

The should have, of course. In a society that sees them more as targets for faux rebellion, faux outrage, faux sexuality and dozens more other fauxs and tells them they'll only find their identity and values when they reject the ones given to them, they've had many teachers for that lesson.

Commence!

Tonight the local high school was finally able to hold its commencement for the graduating class of 2020. The young lady who earned the valedictorian honors gave a pretty good speech and the superintendent said some encouraging words to the recent graduates, so it was overall a nice ceremony.

Often I share the opinion that a high school diploma is thought to mean quite a bit more than it does mean and is held in a little higher esteem than it should be. Ideally it's the first achievement in a person's life rather than the high point. But tonight we'll set that idea aside. The young people lost their spring sports, their prom, their awards assemblies and the like. But they got to have their moment, when they moved the tassel and tossed that weird hat in the air and celebrated what, this year more than any, they had slogged their way through.

Good job, grads.

The One With the Dumbass Parents

That the bad behavior examined in this Atlantic article is being committed by parents rather than students is only one of the ironies involved. Another is that had Sidwell Friends Academy stayed a little truer to its roots the level of animosity would shrink drastically: "Friends" or Quakers are pacifists known for their mostly gentle and inoffensive ways.

Unlearning

Scott Sumner, an economist at George Mason University, offers a case about why economics education shouldn't push behavioral economics so hard at an early stage of economics education.

"Behavioral economics" is apparently a blending of some basic economic theory with social science concepts that, at least as Sumner sees it, tends to dilute some of the essential economic information a basic econ course needs to teach. Instead, he said, the basic course should show students how data demonstrates that a lot of things that seem like they should make sense and work actually don't, and how economics can give someone a better idea of what really goes on.

I don't have nearly enough knowledge of the field to know whether or not all of the fallacies Sumner lists in his article are indeed fallacious, although I suspect he could offer some good data that show they are. What does resonate a little is that a big part of educating people is helping them unlearn things they know that aren't true. A person in my field spends a significant amount if his or her time doing exactly that -- probably more than once, and probably upon himself or herself as much as anyone else.

As in so many other fields, it's not that we don't know things. It's just that we know so many things that aren't so.

Purpose Undetermined

I can understand that students today might have difficulty reading clocks with hands and the numbers arranged around the edge of a circle. They see digital timepieces much more frequently.

I can't understand the response of some schools to remove the old-fashioned clocks and replace them with digital ones. My lack of understanding grows from two sources:

1) Once upon a time, even those of us who lived prior to the digital clock era didn't know how to read clocks with hands. Although I can't remember exactly when it was, I have an image of a teacher moving hands around a brightly-colored clock face and asking us to tell her what time that showed, and also of a test that had pictures of clocks set to different times.

2) Aren't schools the places where people LEARN THINGS THEY DON'T HAPPEN TO ALREADY KNOW?!?!?!?!?! Because if the story at the link is correct, some schools in Merrie Olde England, when confronted with students who lack knowledge, don't even think about, oh, TEACHING THEM. Nope, they just consider student ignorance too high a mountain to climb, something we'll just have to learn to live with.

How about the counter-argument, that students would simply be wasting time in learning how to read time in the obscure format and that time could be spent more usefully elsewhere? Well, that presumes it takes longer than oh, a couple of hours to teach kids which hand points to hours and which one points to minutes. And if it does, well, then the kids aren't the only ones in the room laboring under a heavy burden of ignorance.

Re-do?

Oklahoma's school teachers, frustrated by inaction on state funding for schools, are considering a repeat of a 1990 walkout that succeeded in prodding action from the state legislature at the time.

Teachers stayed away from class, with many visiting the state capitol to explain themselves, for four days that year and eventually moved the state legislature to pass what was then House Bill 1017. Governor Henry Bellmon, who had supported the package of funding increases and reform measures, signed it into law as the Education Reform Act of 1990. The young Friar, then reporting for a newspaper, covered that rally. He did so in fear that one of his own former teachers might see him, drag him bodily into the capitol building and show legislators exactly why teachers should be paid more than they were, but fortunately that did not happen.

Although I can agree with those who see the current situation as a crisis-level event on a par with that year, there may be too many differences between 1990 and 2018 to allow a walkout to be as effective today.

The problem most recently manifested itself with the failure to pass the measure called "Step Up Oklahoma," which would have increased some state taxes to fund teacher pay increases as well as some other areas of the state education system. Since State Question 640 amended the state constitution in 1992, tax increases require either a 75% majority of both state legislative houses or simple majority passage as a general ballot measure. The state House could not reach that threshold.

The first wrinkle for a walkout today deals with the makeup of the state legislature. In 1990 it was majority Democratic, but today it is majority Republican. The state teacher's union, the Oklahoma Education Association, most often supports Democratic candidates and officeholders. Democratic legislators were quite a bit more apprehensive about a group of pissed-off teachers and their union  than Republicans, many of whom won office in spite of OEA opposition. A drive to elect more educators and educational supporters in the 2016 election cycle produced few victories, suggesting to many Republican legislators that their offices don't depend on the goodwill of traditional educational power bases.

Another wrinkle is the aforementioned 75% threshold for tax increase legislation. Legislative leaders in 1990 had to get 50% of their caucuses to accept HB 1017. They could have 49% cranks who would never ever ever vote for any kind of tax increase ever ever and still get a bill passed. The higher percentage also means that the remaining opposition is likely to be tougher to convince. The walkout was designed to bring pressure on the legislators to pass the bill, but the pressure on today's lawmakers is already pretty darn high. The remaining holdout representatives -- a mix of Republicans and Democrats -- are solidly committed to their various reasons for opposing the tax increases any education funding measure would require. Their motives may be sincere or venial, but if they've held out this long they're a lot more likely to keep it up.

As OEA director David DuVall notes in the Tulsa World story, the 1990 walkout had the advantage of a very easily understood goal: Passage of HB 1017. Teachers could say, "We're out of here until you pass this bill." A 2018 walkout would need a similar lodestone. Students at Bartlesville High School walked out of class Friday morning to signal support for their teachers, and the response of one local legislator -- who voted against the Step Up package -- was to suggest folks support three separate house bills that he said would allow for a teacher pay increase. Whether that's true or not, it makes for a pretty nebulous rallying cry.

The largest elephant in the room in terms of hurdles the 1990 group didn't have to deal with is leadership ability among the politicians involved. Henry Bellmon may not have been Cincinnatus, but he was a considerably better leader than the current governor, Mary Fallin. Bellmon was a Republican dealing with a majority Democratic legislature (and a Democratic State Superintendent of Schools) and got a reform and funding package passed. Fallin is a Republican dealing with a majority Republican legislature and Republican superintendent and has watched more than one measure be defeated. Her entire political career has consisted of being in the right place at the right time and her deficiencies in leadership ability have been clearly exposed in this running battle.

Legislatively, the state Senate has stepped up; during the recent special session Senate President Pro Tem Mike Schulz has been able to get the 75% margins the tax increase bills required. 1990's President Pro Tem, Robert Cullison, was similarly effective. The House, on the other hand, is a different matter. Rep. Steve Lewis had taken the Speaker position from Jim Barker in 1989 and was a co-author of the 1017 measure. Current Speaker Charles McCall has been lukewarm at best to most of the measures brought forward, even when he votes for them.

As mentioned once before, the contemporary Friar isn't at all sure he knows how to fix the many broken aspects of the state educational system. Perhaps a properly timed teacher walkout would prompt funding and reform measures that could work. But if it's just an expression of frustration with the process and the people running it, there's not much point -- that's way too common of a feeling for people to take notice of how anyone decides to show it.

Malicious Math?

Of course, the issue is not that folks on the internet have a hard time solving this particular math puzzle. As the story at Mental Floss indicates, there's more than one way to do it and neither of them are just plain and simple.

No, the issue is that this poser was an extra credit problem on a first grade math test in Singapore, if the original poster is to be believed. It's possible, although I'm a little skeptical. But I might not have come up with anything like a decent guess in grade one through 12, so probably don't go by me.

Cart, Horse...

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel doesn't think his city's schools are doing their job of educating the students in them. A number of things, like test scores, graduation statistics and the naked eye back him up on this.

So he's proposed a solution. In order to receive their diplomas, Chicago seniors will have to show "an acceptance letter to a four-year university, a community college, a trade school or apprenticeship, an internship, or a branch of the armed services." In other words, the only people who can have a Chicago public school diploma are the ones who've managed to transcend the dismal system in which they have been laboring for the last 12 years.

The statistics in the Huffington Post story say that nine out of every 10 Chicago public school students has to take remedial courses at whatever college they attend because they can't do the very things that a high school diploma is supposed to indicate they can. That 91 percent figure is from 2014 but I can't imagine it's dropped much since then, if indeed it's dropped at all. It's almost as though the Mayor doesn't want to give kids a diploma until he can be assured that the city's school system hasn't completely wrecked their chances at a future.

And it's kind of a weak goad in any event, because he's only talking about the actual piece of paper itself. Many of those post-high school options in his list kind of require a student to graduate in order to enter them, which means the student has to be listed as having fulfilled all the requirements to do so. Universities don't accept incomplete high school transcripts. If I'm accepted to a four-year university, what the heck do I need the piece of paper for? My mom can probably tell you where my high school diploma is but I have exactly zero idea. Even for people who like to cover an office wall with diplomas and certificates the value of a high school diploma is marginal -- if there's limited room and one has to go, then adios alma mater.

Having worked at a college before, I can point to a lot of anecdotal evidence that few high schools really get students "ready for college." Time management skills, study habits, reading for information, ability to write clearly -- and that's before we get anywhere near actual knowledge content. Smart kids who went to good high schools were not really prepared for the changed environment of campus life and the university classroom. So while they may be worse than a lot of others (and better than a few), this is not a problem limited to Chicago schools.

Mayor Emanuel's proposed solution, on the other hand, has less of an excuse for its seeming cluelessness. The Mayor attended suburban Winnetka's New Trier High School (he was at the west campus when it was still open), identified as one of the nation's top schools in national magazines as far back as the 1950s. From there he went to private Sarah Lawrence College and picked up a master's from the private Northwestern University.

So he oughtta be smarter than this.

Who Rule Bartertown?

It'd be hard to top, as far as high school experiences go, finding out and publishing information that got your principal canned. But some student reporters in Pittsburg, KS, did just that.

An ordinary "Meet our new principal"-type assignment turned into an exposé about how the incoming administrator's qualifications were, to say the least, not what they seemed. Educational achievements from questionable institutions, work experiences that didn't add up and so on were brought to light, and the just-hired principal resigned before even officially starting the job.

Now, it seems there may be some legitimate differences of opinion about the resigned principal's actual qualifications. The college in question, which is not accredited now, might have been at the time she took coursework since that was some 20 years or more ago.

But what doesn't seem at issue to me is that the administration and board of the school district are ill-qualified to select a principal of any kind. If high school student journalists can find out stuff like this, you have to wonder why search committees of educational professionals can't. Of course, maybe it's not the case that they couldn't find out the info and check out the record.

Maybe they just didn't bother -- which makes it hard to say what's worse.

Stunned!

I laud my alma mater, Northwestern University, because it is the vanguard of the fight against Illini communism -- a danger of which far too few people seem to be aware. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have its flaws. Sometimes really big ones.

However, this item does not represent a flaw as much as it makes you wonder why a particular study was done. Economics prof and university president Morton Schapiro and econ prof David Figlio gathered data from first-year students between 2001 and 2008, looking for indicators that showed which instructors were the best teachers. They then compared the results with those that showed which professors ranked highest in resarch.

Here's the stunner: No correlation. Now, while it's kind of nice to have at least one empirical study on hand showing that skills at research do not necessarily imply skills at teaching, and vice-versa, it's also sort of a non-surprise. It's almost like the fields of teaching and research are different from each other and success in one of them may require skills which the other one doesn't, or even skills that might hold one back in pursuit of standing in the other!

Now, they didn't survey students going back to my days on campus -- which is good because a number of those events are directly connected with large brain cell die-offs. I bet, though, we would have reported much the same data as our successors did some 20 years later. I could not have told you for the life of me which of my professors was a top researcher, even when they were instructors in my field and major. But I could tell you which ones were lousy teachers. And even though the judgment of an undergraduate about a teacher's quality may lean a little heavily towards ease of passing the class, simplicity of assignments, wittiness of lectures and "coolness" or something similar, we'd probably have still been in the ballpark.

The study doesn't say that great teachers can't be great researchers, or the flipside either. It just says the two don't have any correlation. You'd kind of hope that the fact that one of the profs conducting the study was the university president would have an impact on who gets hired to teach at that school. I guess undergrads at NU will see, and we'll all discover whether President Schapiro is a good learner, or just a good researcher.

Class in Session?

The latest development in the ongoing educational funding crisis facing our fair state is a slew of educators filing for seats in the state legislature. News stories have highlighted a "teacher caucus" of folks signing up to run, most with the idea of using the authority of the state legislature to bring about changes in our public education system.

A couple of months ago I noted one of the sillier responses to this serious problem, the meme snarking on the relative rankings of how much teachers and legislators in Oklahoma are paid compared to other states. I offered my own superficial tuppence on the problem, which I said probably wasn't going to be solved by most of the solutions that involve dumping a big bucket of money into a flawed and outdated system. I was also clear that I am the Mondayest of Monday morning quarterbacks, not having followed these policy debates very closely for many years and lacking any plan of my own. So on the one hand, kudos to those folks who decided that they'd solve little from the sidelines.

The lists I've seen don't make this "caucus" as solid as the headlines do. Some are listed as "public education advocate," which is a pretty nebulous term that a lot of people would apply to themselves whether educators agreed with them or not. Others are "public school parents," which includes a whole lot of currently serving legislators who are seen as the cause of the problem. Some are retired educators, some are school board members and some are currently working teachers. They'll have to contend with the view that they're running for office to vote themselves a pay raise -- a statement that's probably unfair but will get made plenty of times anyway and believed enough to cause them problems.

But on the other hand, it's unlikely that this slate of filers will make it intact into the legislature, and those who do will find their plans obstructed by some of the same realities that hamstring current legislators who try to change the system.

The story at the Tulsa World lists several of the filers but doesn't note their party affiliation. Some will run as Democrats, some as Republicans and some as independents.The independents are almost guaranteed to be toast. Without a party structure to connect to, they will have to find and raise their own resources in their races. The natural source of funds, volunteers and so on would be educators' associations and teachers' unions -- in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Educator's Association or OEA. Unfortunately for those people, if they are running in a race with a Democratic candidate they will find the OEA is already likely to have committed its support to that person. The association and state Democratic party have a long relationship and OEA leaders would have to see a very weak Democratic candidate, a very strong independent candidate, a combination of the two or some other set of unlikely circumstances to risk that bond. Such instances will be rare if they exist.

Many will file as Democrats. Public school educators remain one of the strongest blocs of support for the state party, but it has been in disarray for many years. Dozens of Republican legislators gained their seats without Democratic opposition when their races drew not even token opposition. GOP State Rep. Sally Kern has been one of the Democratic party's least-liked legislators for years, but in the 2014 elections no Democrat filed against her. This new potential caucus may have significant educational connections and credibility, but in the eyes of many people who vote a straight party ticket, they will be Democrats before they are anything else. The likelihood of the national Democratic ticket being led by someone extremely unpopular among Oklahomans will not help the local candidates' causes.

Some candidates will file as Republicans. GOP leadership of the state legislature has led many people to lay the blame for the current problems at its door and rank-and-file party members who think smarter choices could definitely have fixed this problem aren't shy about their opinions. Republicans who file against incumbent Republicans while lambasting the party leadership will find little help coming their way. If they win primary elections they might get some more support in general elections, but they will take back seats to candidates who are less vocal in their disapproval.

Plus, the educators' associations and groups still lean towards Democrats. They were able to push challenger Joy Hofmeister over incumbent Janet Barresi in the 2014 GOP primary race for state superintendent, but that was a statewide post and Barresi was uniquely hated. The full-throated roar backing Hofmeister in the primary was much more muted come November. Either way the winners will find that getting elected was the easy job.

They will still have to contend with the absence of money. They will still have to work around the restrictions on state tax increases which require either a 75% supermajority of legislative approval or approval on a statewide ballot. They will have to contend with a less-than-stellar executive who may not be interested in helping them -- and almost certainly isn't likely to be all that helpful even if she is. They will discover they are not the only state agency that doesn't want to be cut and can make a good case to the voters that they shouldn't be. They may have to make compromises in order to get some of what they want and have to settle for not getting all of it.

They'll probably find out that making laws may be a lot like making sausage in that no one wants to watch it happening, but also in that being the ones who make it happen isn't all roses and daffodils either. Which may be a pretty useful lesson.

Write It Right

When I read this blog entry at Inside Higher Ed, in which professor John Warner describes the hoops he has to jump through to get his college students to forget what they learned about "essays" in high school, I have only one thought:

Thanks, Mr. Love, for assigning those two research papers junior year in American History. I'm pretty sure the only thing that helped me lift my undergraduate GPA from dismal to mediocre was the fact that I knew how to write a real essay with an argument, supporting evidence and a point.

Think-About Things

Our fair state of Oklahoma has been undergoing a crisis recently regarding funding of our public education system. Although a little more diversified than 30 years ago, we are still heavily depending for revenue on the production of a primary product, oil. You may ask any Latin American country in the early and middle part of the 20th century how well that works out for revenue when the bottom drops out of the market for your primary product. Be prepared for extensive scoffing.

In addition, our legislature recently passed a series of measures that would trigger tax cuts when projected state revenue collections hit certain levels. When the price for the black gold was high, we hit those targets and the cuts were triggered. But soon afterwards, the price dropped and in addition to the funds we lose from reduced production revenues, we also take a hit from the decreased state income because of the lower tax rate. Every state agency has been directed to cut expenses because the money coming from the state isn't there, and schools are among those hardest hit. A ballot measure from 1992 puts any tax increase to a popular vote if it doesn't get a 75% supermajority in the state legislature, which means that rescinding the cut is an uphill slog.

The president of one of the state's two large universities, David Boren, has gotten a measure on the ballot that would impose a statewide one-cent sales tax to fund education, focusing mainly on teacher salaries, which are lower here than in surrounding states (Edit: This measure is not yet on the ballot but is collecting petitions to see if it can be. My apologies). Sales taxes, of course, are regressive because the amounts take a larger percentage of smaller incomes. They're also often one of the few ways small towns and counties can raise revenue, and this man who lives in a free house and gets paid pretty well by different corporate boards in addition to his university check is president of a place that pays its football coach about 135 times the average salary of a public school teacher.

Recently, the meme at the top of this post gathered some views after it used information from a news story that compared Oklahoma legislators' ranking among their peers to Oklahoma educators' ranking among theirs. The figures used place our lawmakers at 15th in the nation and our teachers at 49th, and the meme then closes with the snarky, "Time to change the pay SAID NO LEGISLATOR EVER."

The meme highlights several things. One is that public policy discussion by meme is as useful as spouse-hunting by restroom wall graffiti. You select for the lowest amount of serious thought and you target people whose goals are probably not your own.

And I'm not at all sure it's a valid comparison. Teachers are generally paid according to a salary system, in which the income they are due is divvied up weekly, biweekly or monthly and then paid out on a nine-month or twelve-month schedule. But while Oklahoma also pays its legislators via salary, some states don't. They pay per day for days the legislature is in session, and all but five of them offer per diem reimbursements for expenses incurred while in session or mileage costs. One, New Mexico, pays only the per diem, and its state legislators receive no compensation. How do you compare actual legislative pay between states that base it on days in session or days worked and those which use annual salaries? What would the rankings look like if you found a good working formula and did that? We'll get right on that, SAID NO MEME EVER.

You can choose to ignore my point of view if you like, and you may want to even more once I tell you I think just about every ranking of teacher pay or per-pupil expenditure is of very limited value in trying to figure out what's needed to repair or improve a public education system. Dollar amounts alone do not tell the whole story: Teachers in Chicago have an average annual salary about 50% higher than Oklahoma's and I don't know of any metric that puts their student performance at 50% better. Of course Chicago teachers face a lot of problems Oklahoma teachers don't, or they face much worse versions of them. But that just highlights how a strict dollar-for-dollar comparison doesn't really tell us what's needed to fix the respective schools.

Solutions like President Boren's will wind up solving very little. Pumping more money into a broken system is like pouring more water into a leaky bucket. It will raise the level briefly but the holes will still drain it, perhaps faster than it comes in. The state legislature and the governor worked together in 1990 to pass an education reform act that allotted half a billion dollars to the state school system over five years and earmarked several revenue streams for the Department of Education alone. Did it do enough to fix the problems? Obviously not. And the subsequent passage of the supermajority requirement for tax increases meant that there was next to no chance of following up the cash infusion from the 1990 act once it ran out, guaranteeing that the same problems the system faced in 1990 would one day resurface.

The problems with salaries and school funding are real: Our teachers are not paid what they should be, nor are our schools funded at the level they should be.

The problems with the revenue stream are real: The tax cut was an iffy idea at best considering how hard it would be to go back to the higher rate when need arose. And it made no sense whatsoever to tie the triggers to projected future income instead of to past or current income or to an average of them over several years.

But the problems with a 19th century educational system are real too. It's organized for an agrarian culture without the ability to artificially cool buildings during summer. Its funding and governing structures assume myriad small populations near to but mostly isolated from each other by slow travel. Its methods and instruction principles have as much to do with the Procrustean production of two-legged voting and tax-paying citizen widgets as they do with educating students for their own growth and flourishing as thinking human beings. That many teachers manage to bring about 21st century people testifies to their ability to work in spite of the system that employs them, not because of it.

Do I know how to fix those problems? It's been 25 years since I followed and covered education for my newspaper and had thorough knowledge of its issues on local and state levels, so no, I probably don't. But I'm not the one who's taking taxpayer money to keep an eye on those things. Elected, appointed and hired public employees are, and it's hard to argue against the idea that they're failing as miserably as did most of their predecessors over the last 50 years to do anything about it.

Given the human ability to la-la-la-la-not-liiiiisten I fear solutions won't come until something completely breaks down and brutal necessity mothers enough invention and courage to try to construct a public education system with the world of the 21st century student in mind. And I also fear that if the state somehow manages to find a Peter with a wallet fat enough to let Paul boost teacher salaries and per-pupil expenditures from their rank in the high 40s to the low 40s or even high 30s, the people who can make that change happen will smile and wave and say they've handled things and la-la-la-la their way long enough that when the problem reappears they'll be sipping retirement coffee and shaking their heads at what the world is coming to and why their barista can't make change.

A Little Extra "R"

The thing I like best about this idea is that the teacher, when he found out what the problem was among his poorer students, also figured out a way to fix it through doing something he already did.

A teacher in Nashville, Matthew Portell, asked his students to read a certain amount of time each day, but one of the students said he didn't have any books in the house. Knowing that this was probably an issue in more than one home, Portell tried to find a way to get books into the homes and hit upon the idea of making the donation an event by using a fleet of bicyclists to bring them to the different schools.

I have a friend who once described how a teacher "punished" a fourth grader by publicly shaming her about an incident connected to a reading and book-buying program. I'd have some reservations about leaving that woman alone with her own children, let alone giving her responsibility for anyone else's. Find me a school system that attracts Matthew Portells and rids itself of this other kind as quickly as possible and you have found me a school system I will always vote for in bond issues.

Underneath the Chalk

You will probably have seen something about this item, in which contractors renovating Emerson High School in Oklahoma City found nearly 100-year-old drawings, writings and lessons on slates underneath the chalk boards they were removing. I call attention to it here because I like several of the things that Jennifer says about the find.

No Bedtime Story

Adam Swift, a professor of political theory at the University of Warwick, demonstrates that in order to get an idea that's weapons-grade stupid, you need an extensive education.

Professor Swift was recently interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's The Philosophers' Zone, where he discussed the theory of egalitarian families he is trying to develop with his colleague Harry Brighouse. Among the things that Professor Swift would like to see is the elimination of private schools, which help create advantage gaps that exacerbate inequalities in society. In other words, rich and (sometimes) smart kids who go to private schools have an unfair advantage over poor and smart kids who go to regular public schools. I think a better path than closing down good schools is improving less good ones, but we can live and let live on disagreements about that sort of thing.

The one thing Professor Swift talked about that got some press, though, was noting how parents who read to their kids at night should be aware they are providing their child an unfair advantage over the parents who don't. He magnanimously allows such parents a few nights off of feeling guilty about all of the kids who don't get read to, but still says they should think about that occasionally. Whether or not they should actually do anything that might help out some of those kids and families apparently is a matter for smaller minds than Professor Swift's.

And while we're at it, I don't believe parents are under any effin' obligation to think about this matter in terms of "unfair advantages." Feeling something about kids whose parents' decisions, freely made or otherwise, disadvantage them even before they get to the starting line is a good thing. Wanting to somehow respond to help those so disadvantaged is also a good thing. But the mere existence of my reading parents did not cause someone else's non-reading parents, and pretending otherwise as Professor Swift seems to suggest is just plan silly.

Professor Swift compares the existence of elite private schools to reading parents, and says that while the elimination of the schools wouldn't harm the family bonding process, elimination of reading at bedtime would. It has value beyond its educational benefits. He's a prince, ain't he? It takes someone who gets paid to be listened to by impressionable 18-year-olds about whatever airy fancy flits through his brain to even talk about conditions under which bedtime reading could somehow be reduced or eliminated.

Leave aside practical considerations, such as how such behavior could ever be curtailed outside of a world where clocks strike 13, 2+2=5 and Winston Smith loves Big Brother. Philosophy professors have spent a lot of money -- mostly mom and dad's and the government's -- to get to a place where they can ignore things like the impossibility of surveilling every pre-schooler at bedtime,  and we shouldn't ask them to just waste all of that by reminding them how much of the world gets by without encountering philosophy professors for years at a time.

No, let's just look at the big ol' existential elephant in junior's bedroom, which is that whether or not parents read to kids at bedtime is none of Professor Swift's gorram business. His belief that there's a utility to the activity that makes it acceptable is completely irrelevant. Also, for that matter, is why parents read to their kids or what they think when they do it. My dad did most of the bedtime reading, and I think some of it was because he didn't get to spend as much time with us as mom did since he worked at an office during the day. And sometimes it was because he liked reading and his mom had read to him and he wanted us to like reading too. And sometimes it was because that's what dads did. And sometimes it was because we were wound up and needed the semi-hypnotic effect of a bedtime story to get us ready for sleep.

But even if he was reading excerpts from the Montgomery Burns' Guide to Serf-Crushing with the deliberate intention of helping us to make other kids look dumb and fail at life, it still would have been something about which Professor's Swift's opinions were neither required nor appropriate to offer.

So please, if you have kids, read to them at night and do so free of guilt about what other parents don't do. Read to them to make them smarter, read to them to show them you care, read to them to spend time with them, read to them to help them develop a love of reading and language, read to them whyeverso you want to. And whatever you want to, and do so free of worry about what Professor Swift, I or anyone else thinks about it, because it's none of our business.

Unless you read to them from How Not to Be a Hypocrite: School Choice for the Morally Perplexed Parent, or something like that. Then I'm calling the cops on you.

An Education in Technology

A couple of years ago, the well-degreed and ostensibly bright guy hired to run the Los Angeles Unified School District said he wanted to give all district students iPads to help them learn things. The plan failed spectacularly because the students already knew things -- like how to get around the security settings that were supposed to keep games and time-wasting websites off limits -- and because the well-degreed and ostensibly bright guy and his well-degreed and ostensibly bright staff didn't know things, like whether or not their own facilities had wireless networks that would handle the load.

Monday's Los Angeles Times offers up a report detailing just how epic the failure was, and in a town known for producing epic failures (Waterworld, Heaven's Gate, Ishtar, etc.), the LAUSD iPad project can proudly hold its own.

The cracks began when the superintendent pushing the program went the Apple route instead of looking at lower-cost tablets, many of which can run free software especially designed for educational use. Yes, I use the more expensive Apple products myself, but I spend my own money on my stuff rather than nick your wallet, the way a publicly-funded agency like a school system does. It continued when the purchases were made even before any real plan existed on how to use them. Or how to evaluate which ways of using them worked and which didn't.

And the FBI later became very interested in just how the contracts were awarded, and is still perusing them and musing upon communications concerning them. The well-degreed and ostensibly bright guy who ran the LAUSD and pushed the program is now a consultant for an academy that offers training for school district leaders. Rumors that his course is called "1.3 Billion Ways to Get Invited to Leave Your Job" are unfounded.

The program ended after the pilot phase, or else it would have cost the full $1.3 billion.  I found a figure online showing the average Los Angeles school teacher salary is $59,000, so if it's right the district could have hired a thousand new teachers -- and paid them for nearly 20 years, if we assume their salaries go up over time -- with that money. Does anyone outside of Cupertino, CA, think that a thousand new teachers in a school system would make less of a difference than every kid having his or her own iPad? And that's probably not fair to the folks who work at Apple, because I think they're smart enough to figure out teachers matter more than tech.

On the one hand, LAUSD's iPad program was actually a cut above a lot of public education calls for more money, because it had a specific purpose and the money would be spent directly on students. Many other requests to raise public education spending just offer blanket figures and don't have much of a spending plan beyond raising everyone's salary -- which means the increased funds often wind up hiring a couple of new assistant superintendents or or assistant principals instead of helping teachers or classroom instruction.

On the other hand, it's just a bigger, louder and shinier version of those same calls for more money, because it wasn't tailored to any real need other than the LAUSD administration's belief that every kid in the district should have an iPad. Did those kids need an iPad (or other kinds of tech)? What would they do with them when they got them? How would their teachers use the iPads for teaching? The LAUSD essentially said, "We'll have to get back to you on that. In the meantime, here's the tab -- thanks for picking it up."

Even I can learn a lesson from that trick. Show me what you want to do with the money and how it'll make a difference, and I'll start writing checks. Just tell me you need it and you'll explain what it's for later, and we can talk again when it gets to be "later."

School Positions Available; Common Sense Not Required

A entry at Reason's "Hit and Run" blog details a top -- or maybe bottom -- 10 list of zero-tolerance overreactions in our nation's public schools for 2014. It's probably safe to compile the list even though the entry is dated two days before 2014 actually ends, because schools are not in session at this time. But the ingenuity of these people in being clueless morons is surprising, and they may yet exceed themselves in the 12 hours that remains of the year as I write this.

Sometimes people forward these to me with a question "Why would anyone put their kid in one of these places?" I understand the feeling, and see why these and other incidents prompt parents to opt for private education when possible. The chance that an ordinary kid in the course of an ordinary day could do something that might very well be a mistake and wind up a sacrifice on the altar of that grim gray god of lawyer-sanitized, teachers-union-approved Zero Tolerance Education Policy is something they don't want to risk.

But I'd also have to wonder why anyone who wanted to be a teacher would go to one of these places either.

Students Byte Teacher's Apple?

If you run a school system and you want to make a big splash, buy a lot of glizy, gleaming tech and offer it to the students. But according to Dr. Madhav Chavan, who runs the educational non-profit company Pratham in India, that purchase probably won't do much for students who aren't already going to succeed.

The reason, Dr. Chavan says, is because the tech is just a patch on a broken system, and because much of the modern communication and information system isn't linear. While the traditional education system, which sorts students into grades and categories based on age and shlurps them up at one end to dispense them at the other whether they are actually educated or not, is most definitely linear.

I won't argue with Dr. Chavan, whose company is the largest nongovernmental education supplier in India. He began it after teaching chemistry at the University of Houston and then the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai. Pratham began as a way to provide low-cost preschool education among the poorest people of Mumbai, and its success earned him the WISE Prize in Education in 2012. He probably knows a lot more about the intersection of technology and education than I do, and I would have to agree about the limited effectiveness of a non-linear-oriented set of tools in somehow repairing or improving a linear system.

But I'd take it one step more, myself. To me, one of the largest reasons that technology alone can't "fix" broken education systems is that education of human beings requires, before anything else, invested and interested human beings. The best teachers I remember are ones who wanted me to know the stuff they taught because I would be better off knowing it. My least favorites either wanted me to think just like they did or didn't much care whether I came out of class knowing anything more than I did when I went in. The best could teach with chalk and a flat rock; the worst couldn't help me learn anything with a Cray XK7 at their disposal.

Of course, hiring teachers like that means you have to make some room for them by offloading the dead weight. And ditching a significant percentage of anybody employed by the school who has a two- or three-word title beginning with "assistant" or "deputy." And probably a couple of other things, but I doubt Dr. Chavan needs my advice on that.