Nattering nabobs of negativism

I have been bothered lately by the nattering nabobs of negativism. You know the ones. They are education experts who have never sullied themselves by actually working with students in a classroom. If they did spend a few years teaching, they might actually learn something.

I serve on the State Investment Board, and regularly attend education conferences on institutional investing. I am never shy about what I do, and while at a session this summer, education reform came up as an informal topic of discussion at dinner. I held my own as I pointed out the flaws in the logic my tablemates were using as they attempted to “fix” something they were unfamiliar with. After about 20 minutes into the discussion, a fellow from New York joined the discussion. He related how he wanted to do something to make a difference, so he was granted a sabbatical from his employer and spent two years teaching English in a high school. He said his biggest shock was how dedicated and hard-working the teachers were, how much they really cared, and the lengths they would go to in order to provide the best education possible for the students. He had expected to find dedicated teachers, but assumed they were a minority. Instead, dedication, teamwork and quality were the norm, and the less than stellar teachers — he called them coasters — were a tiny minority. He said maybe two out of 90 teachers at his school fit this category. He agreed with me that the real education world was not what was described in the media and if we really wanted to improve public education, we would provide the resources and leave the task to the teachers.

The sticking point is that people are looking for excuses to avoid paying for what they say they want — a quality education for all students.

That is the real hurdle — the resources, also known as funds, or the money. There is lots of big talk about rewards and bonuses, but never a whisper about how to fund them. The only talk about funding is how much to cut, while at the same time increasing requirements and, as a distraction, criticizing those who give their all for their students. And through it all, dedicated educators, both certificated and classified, continue to do more with less.

Statistics, probability and measurement

I just finished reading The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow. It gives a history of statistics, probability and measurement, and how they are used currently to inform and how easily they can misinform when used improperly. Also in the book he highlights Washington’s Bill Gates for special mention about the misuse of information when he sought to “fix” public education by deciding that small schools were the solution, the silver bullet, to make all perfect with public education. After disastrous results, he regrouped and is now pushing charter schools and teacher pay tied to test scores as the panacea, even though there is no research which shows this will do any better than what is happening right now. But no fear, facts will not stop this effort; he has the money to burn to push his notion of public education. After all, if you had any good ideas, you would be as rich as he is.

This tied right in with a radio interview I heard recently on NPR with Rep. Lamar Alexander. He was outraged that the U.S. government now had a significant investment in General Motors and “535 members of Congress will be trying to tell auto manufacturers how to make automobiles.” I appreciate his concern; after all, Congress, state Legislatures, and influential, I mean rich, members of the public all want to exclude educators while they tinker with public education, and all the while blaming educators for being less than perfect. As an engineer who became a teacher, I can state with total conviction that it is far easier to design and build a quality automobile than it is to educate a child. And in auto manufacturing, if you repeat your process, you repeat your results. As any parent of multiple children can attest, repeating the process on raising a child can have dramatically different results. As Nobel laureate Max Born once said, “Chance is a more fundamental concept than is causality.”

Mlodinow also dove into the misuse of testing in education. Testing serves a useful purpose in education, but as soon as something is measured, it is subject to misuse by people who not only do not understand what measurement really is, but also that all measurements have a variability, or error. A good example he uses is the SAT scores which have an error of ± 50 points. So if one person scores 20 points higher than another on the SAT, they are really tied because you cannot tell who actually had the higher score. He also described a similar occurrence with the first election of our current governor. The candidates tied because the difference between the two candidates’ vote totals was less than the error of measurement. They could have flipped a coin to determine a winner, but our state has a more complicated system to break the tie. People who don’t understand measurement would be outraged by deciding our governor by flipping a coin, so we have a much more expensive but equally random method for breaking the tie.

Thus we have these real life math problems that don’t go away just because you are a billionaire who doesn’t comprehend the research in a field you know nothing about. Very real problems for someone who, because of a societal lack of understanding regarding randomness, reliability, and measurement, is condemned to a life of lost opportunities and lower earnings due to the denial of a high school diploma because of the misuse of a high-stakes test.