SOSDD

Paul Richardson, May 2011

I read yesterday a commentary in Education Week trying to motivate
school boards to balance their resource allocations to be fair to the
“Gap” children. He bemoaned the fact that all of these years after the
Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision the gap in
learning of our disadvantaged children has not improved. And he is
right but as always in education it is an excuse to remind us that it is an
external problem (school board in this case) to the sacrosanct and perfect
education system they want us to believe exists. So the problem is
defined by education insiders as school boards not doing the right thing,
the people and legislators not providing the proper level of funding,
parents not sending the kids to school already knowing how to read,
write, do math and perfectly behaved. This is not an exhaustive list as
the education establishment is very adept at deflecting the blame for
their poor performance to any mildly plausible target.
Is anyone else bothered that our education problems rotate among the
current year’s “cause célèbre?” The gap problem is certainly on the
rotation and gets “undivided attention” (talk and more money thrown
around to no effect) for a period of time periodically. You may
remember that I have written before about the Colorado Closing the
Achievement Gap Commission Final Report of November 2005. In the
report they do a fine job of defining the problem and admitting that the
problem was only worse than when Robert Kennedy said a “third of a
Century” ago that the problem was a stain on our national honor.
However, the proposed solutions to the problem amounted to redoubling
the effort to do the things that have failed so miserably in the past, better
this time. UGH!! We could be excused for asking, “When will they
ever learn?”
In reality the education fiefdom (defensive, delusional, insular, inbred
and uneducated), doesn’t ever learn anything new. That might cause
them to realize that the status quo is unacceptable, which it certainly is.
If you remember my original four attributes of the education Fiefdom
you will notice I added uneducated this time. Oh, there is an oversupply
of worthless degrees from bachelors to masters to doctorates. Rita
Kramer in her book, Ed School Follies asserts our educators are
uneducated. She means by that they only study process in education
schools and therefore do not have any subject knowledge worth
mentioning. She says wisely that anyone who doesn’t know and love
the subject they are teaching is not going to be effective.
Is this a problem? Yes, it is central to the choice of content free
(discovery, constructivist) curricula because the knowledge to teach kids
subject knowledge is missing. We are the only nation that uses this
uncompetitive approach. All the nations whose kids are learning so
much more than ours, use a content rich approach and have teachers who
know the subject so they can teach effectively. Tragically, America with
the Common School movement of Horace Mann, Noah Webster and
others used the same method that our competitors use today. We
listened to the Siren Songs of John Dewey, Fitzpatrick (Columbia
Teachers College “million dollar” professor) who denigrated the great
system we had at the time to install their progressive system designed to
prepare people to work as “tell us what to do” workers in “big box”
entities like industrial factories. The idea was to allow students to
“explore and discover” the subject knowledge on their own. Of course
this process is much slower because reinventing the wheel is slow and
unpredictable. Thus, we discarded a system that worked and replaced it
with the one that hasn’t worked and can’t work. This is why spending
one more day or dollar and doing the wrong thing better which is the
current approach is idiocy to the max. So why don’t we change? Good
question and there is a good answer.
The Fiefdom has had time to develop a very effective strategy to
prevent any real change from happening. They have time to do this
because they are not spending time learning to understand subjects or
improve anything. They are playing defense and we need to remember
that. The central tenet of their approach is to use their pseudo
professionalism to convince those interested in making productive
change that the education expert process must be followed when
considering any change. Thus, they demand that all changes being
considered are studied by a committee of educators and community
members. The administrators carefully select members of the committee
to prevent any meaningful representation from truly motivated change
champions. They may allow a token or two but make sure they are a
distinct minority. This committee usually takes more than a year to
reach its recommendations. If they recommend a change, the educators
demand research by education experts to validate the recommendations.
Of course, this is a rigged game because the “experts” are all part of the
”status quo at all costs” conspiracy. This process takes years typically
and allows perhaps the biggest problem in making productive change in
education to rear its ugly head. That is turnover in administration
(especially the superintendent), school board members, or even key
advocates of change who may move to a different job or become
discouraged. This turnover provides an excuse to “restart” the process
with new membership. Thus nothing positive ever happens.
This process is very effective at preserving the status quo and very, very
effective at harming generation after generation of students. This is
especially true for the gap students. However, we must remember that
all of our students are being shortchanged by our mainline schools.
While we always hear of all the exceptional kids who are stars in terms
of scholarships, SAT and ACT scores, etc., they are the exception and in
most cases I have seen they have a large component of parent provided
support in the form of parent teaching, tutors, attendance of charter or
private schools, or home school episodes to address problem areas. The
overall performance of our kids versus their best foreign competition is
mediocre (literacy) to poor (science and math). Perhaps most
interesting is that the change process is based on the same premises of
the “wandering in the wilderness” learning process employed by our
schools. It is like taking a trek in the wilderness without a guide or a
map. You can wander a long time. If you have a guide who knows the
territory (or a teacher who knows the subject) you can get where you
want to go much more quickly and safely. The educators depend on the
discovery process to slow any change effort to ineffectiveness.
Facts you need to know to counteract the false doctrine of the education
Fiefdom

 We don’t need to figure out what works or spend time on

committees, hiring education expert consultants or long winded
harangues at board meetings. It is well known what needs to be
done. We must demand that the changes be implemented
immediately.
 Education research is of poor quality. It is often slanted to reach
the desired conclusion or poorly done from a statistical rigor point
of view. Also, the researchers are careful to avoid telling
comparisons between the status quo activities and those that are
much better at teaching kids.
 The current education system was designed to create that
population of worker bees good at taking direction in the industrial
big box settings. It was also designed to create an easily
 convinced, credulous populace subject to “expert” top-down
control.
 You cannot work with educators to bring about improvement. You
must TELL them what they must do if they want to continue
working in education. No other approach has worked or will work.
If you aren’t prepared to go to war to get better education for our
kids then you need to accept the poor performance and/or take
responsibility for teaching your kids yourself.
 The current system is not preparing our kids to compete for high
paying knowledge work jobs of the future. How many burger
flippers do we need?
 Politicians (local school board, state legislators, national
legislators) are all overly prone to cater to the education power
groups because they are more effective than the heterogeneous
public who only become unified when something big unifies them.
Perhaps the most powerful of these power groups is the teachers
union which can give large campaign contributions to sway
targeted elections and can marshal their members to walk the areas
to convince voters who to vote for their candidate with very
slanted messages designed to protect their selfish agenda.
 The current content free approach is harmful to all kids but is far
more harmful to the gap kids. They typically don‘t have the
support system that their peers do to somewhat attenuate the
impact of the poor current approach.
I have some questions for you. Is educating our kids to be competitive
in the global economy worthwhile or will the tooth fairy make sure
everything works out ok for them? Do you really think that anything
will change under the current system unless the public revolts and wrests
control from the education experts who aren’t? If you are objective you
realize that we are on a long trek toward the future destroying cliff. Is
the Thelma and Louise approach a good choice because that is certainly
where we are headed. It is tragic that we spend the most per student of
all the countries in the world with the exception of a couple of small
countries and yet our performance is poor. You must know in your gut
that something is drastically wrong with this picture.
Patton said that fixed fortifications were a monument to the stupidity of
man. The current Fiefdom defenses are nothing if not fixed defenses.
Sadly, we have no Patton type leaders to bypass the education fixed
fortifications and rescue the kids, especially the gap kids from the poor
performance of our schools. RFK was right, this is a stain on our
national honor.
For those who haven’t already realized it the SOSDD, stands for Same
Old “Stuff” Different Day which acknowledges that the education
performance has been mired in a huge unproductive rut. It doesn’t
matter what day it is, nothing ever changes.