Go Elon Go!!
And now Musk et al go for the Department of Education, with wrestling guru Linda McMahon soon to be at the helm.
In a rare effort to be fair and balanced, I say, “Go for it!”
Not the whole department, of course. But most of it.
The Department lists four broad purposes:
Establishing policies on federal financial aid for education and distributing as well as monitoring those funds.
Collecting data on America's schools and disseminating research.
Focusing national attention on key issues in education, and makes recommendations for education reform.
Prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education.
#1 is essential, in part. Title I provides funding for schools in the poorest pockets of our country. I’d prefer that it didn’t allow support for charter schools, but yanking Title I would do irreparable harm until such time that other funding mechanisms are developed. The “monitoring” part should be excised, as it is rife with testing and other quantitative requirements needlessly burdening schools that are burdened enough. The complex mess of student loans is horrifying, but also essential until such fairytale time that we develop a more rational system of higher education funding.
#2 and #3 can be jettisoned in their entirety. As the exchange below argues, junk science based on mountains of data has arguably harmed education repeatedly for more than 40 years. The harm has been committed in the name of “education reform” which, through its various acronymic iterations, has created reams of false narratives, streams of testing and publishing revenue, and teams of economists and statisticians who dominate university faculties and utterly useless “think” tanks.
#4 is critically important, but has been a catastrophic failure, particularly the “equal access” part. Of course, our political class never really intended that anyway.
The reasons for my skepticism - disdain - are implicit in this exchange I had last week with my brother, Pete. He is expressing part of his midlife crisis by seeking a masters degree. In response to one of my blog posts he sent a memo (lightly edited by me) that he wrote to his professor/thesis advisor:
This week our class considers the question of how people learn, which we have examined by reading three chapters of the book How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, published by the National Academies Press. Consider me unimpressed.
The question - “How do people learn?” - is a good one: all teachers should ask it, iteratively, throughout their careers. My problem is with the implication - given the title of the book – that there are definitive answers to the question. More troublingly, the book contends that there are scientific answers – that is, things we know (in the fully epistemological sense) about how people learn that we have determined from scientific research and its processes.
Not only is that demonstrably false, save for relatively trivial conclusions that don’t progress much beyond common sense, but worse, it reinforces the trendy impetus to make everything in education “scientific,” with structure, systematic approaches, prescribed methodologies, “standards” (oh, the horror), measurable outcomes and assessment. If, in taking a step back from it all, one sniffs an idiotic version of a factory model in the air, it is no surprise. The pell-mell rush in our current culture to legitimize things by making them scientific (supposedly), or at least making them look scientific, has married effectively and tragically with our infatuation with technology, which operates (so most people think) along equally systematic lines, and encourages the same. The resulting process-and-outcome-focused attitude towards education is nothing short of poison to the art and craft of teaching – and of learning.
First, it bears mentioning that if we are to embrace the starry-eyed excitement the book gives us over all we have learned recently about cognitive function, the 1999 publishing date makes it woefully out of date. Little matter: we haven’t missed much. Myers Briggs had its day in the sun as important to learning; it has been largely repudiated. Multiple intelligences was a hot idea; it is mostly passé, superseded by P.AS.S. and VARK – congratulations if you know what those are (and note the “sciency” or “techy” faddishness with acronyms… talk about pseudo-legitimization). And on and on. I could fill the page with examples of the latest trend that is long gone.
The truth is that we have very little idea how people learn. The cornerstone of learning is obviously language – it is how we acquire, represent and communicate knowledge at a human-cognitive level. Yet despite the life-long efforts of powerful minds like Noam Chomsky, W.V. Quine, Daniel Dennett and Gerald Edelman, among many others, we have little idea of the processes by which language is acquired and used, and how it references things real or imagined. Language learning, semantics and reference remain firmly in the realm of philosophy, not science.
In lieu of dealing with those challenges, we get told in this book that scientific research shows that the cerebral cortex of rats exhibits thickening and weight increase when stimulated physically and socially. Well I’ll be! Children should have stimulating social and physical environments in school! Thank god we had science to help us with that. This is the kind of thing I mean when I claim that such scientific certainly as we can find rises very little above common sense.
Here's another example from the book. In its section on “Studies of Outstanding History Teachers” it has this to say:
“For expert history teachers, their knowledge of the discipline and beliefs about its structure interact with their teaching strategies. Rather than simply introduce students to sets of facts to be learned, these teachers help people to understand the problematic nature of historical interpretation and analysis and to appreciate the relevance of history for their everyday lives.”
Good stuff, and it jibes well with our previous discussion about the epistemology of history. What has it to do with anything scientific? Absolutely nothing.
So, if we can’t have the reassuring validation of science, must we throw up our hands and admit we’re awash in a sea of uncertainty? Of course not: there are lots of other ways to know things, and they’re beautifully at the heart of great teaching and learning. Our science, technology and process/outcome fetishes are not – they get in the way, and we ought not let them.
I responded:
I had a good friend - Calhoun parent Paul Glimcher - who is a very distinguished neuroscientist. We talked frequently, and presented together, about the connections between neuroscience and learning/education. His main responses to my efforts to pair progressive practices with neuroscience were “maybe," and "maybe not." He would occasionally go as far as "probably."
I think, and he agreed in large part, that if any principle might guide educational practice, it would be to approach as much as possible by utilizing all the senses. Nearly everything can be apprehended more fully by engaging more than one sensory system. Obviously one can understand many concepts or phenomena through hearing, seeing, touching or some combination thereof. I used to talk about simple math concepts - addition etc - being more clearly understood through manipulating physical objects, even touching them without sight, or counting sounds. Yes, trivial, but a simple enough piece of teaching guidance.
I think observation of natural human development yields guidance also, although here too the science is unclear.
What makes any strict methodology (science of reading for example) nearly useless is that variables between and among kids - adults too - are complex: Different sensory strengths, developmental "readiness," prior experience, home environment, (especially early exposure) motivation (big one!), and many others.
I think early thinkers, Jerome Bruner for example, and, as you say, philosophers, offer more of value than today’s overreaching pseudo-scientists.
Whatever any of these “scientific” insights may contribute, educators and policy makers are sure to ruin them. For example, I think it's clear that Howard Gardner was on to something, but idiots then started multiple intelligence schools and color-coded the kids.
When I learned that the early target of the Muskovites ransacking the Department of Education was the Institute of Education Science (IES), I beamed ecstatically. That division of the department does the lion’s share of the busy, busy work to which Pete and I refer. You may be amused and dismayed to view their website and note the absence of a single teacher among their rank ranks. Well, not quite. I did find a brief stint with Teach for America in the bio of one staffer.
This omission is characteristic of all the entities who assess, measure, analyze, prescribe, legislate, punish, withhold and otherwise screw around with America’s teachers.
The budget of the DOE is $268 billion, about 4% of the federal budget. That amount of money could go a long way toward reducing class sizes and paying teachers the professional wages they deserve.
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And then let them teach without any more damn education reform.