I don’t have children, so my opinions on education are, shall we say, academic. But our opponents have made public education such an acrimonious issue that I think it’s important to push back on their attacks.
One of my favorite authors is Po Bronson, and I was halfway through his book, NurtureShock, (co-authored by Ashley Merryman) when I came to an invaluable section on work done in early school education by researchers Dr. Elena Bodrova and Dr. Deborah Leong in the 1990s. By now, their program, called Tools of the Mind, has been tested in a number of classrooms around the country.
For example, in 1997, in cooperation with the Denver Public Schools, Bodrova and Leong put their program to a full test in kindergarden classes:
Ten kindergarten teachers were randomly assigned, to teach either Tools or the regular district curriculum. In these classrooms, one-third to one-half of the children were poor Hispanic students who began the year classified as having limited English-language proficiency: they were starting kindergarten effectively a grade-level behind.
The following spring, all the children took national standardized tests. The results were jaw-dropping. The children from the Tools classes were now almost a full grade-level ahead of the national standard. In the district, only half the kindergarteners score as proficient at their grade-level. Of the Tools children, 97% scored as proficient.
More on the program and it’s implications after the squiggly.
This is not a random result. Bronson and Merryman cite other instances where the program has been tested. In two places (Elgin, IL, and Midland, TX) it was ended early because, “The grant money funding the research was available to study children at-risk; after a year, the children no longer scored low enough to be deemed ‘at-risk,’ so the grant money to continue the analysis was no longer available.” (This quote and all others in this posting are from New Thinking About Children: NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, from Twelve/Hatchette Book Group, © 2009.)
In the Tools program, the classroom is set up differently. Things like the calendar and the chart of the alphabet are arranged differently. When class begins, students chose their roles and write them out. Since they are in pre-school or kindergarten, many of them are starting to write for the first time, and their efforts are “little more than lines representing each word in the sentence.”
When play begins, it goes on for an extended time. If a student is distracted, they are gently directed to their play plan.
At this point, if you’re familiar with education or specifically with the program, you may be wondering, “What’s the big deal, Rich? Why are you pointing this out when this has all been around for a while?”
It’s not so much the specifics of this program. It sounds wonderful, and I trust Po Bronson. His books get me emotionally. It gets me very deeply to think how this can improve so many human lives.
But it’s not so much this individual program, it’s that this is what we need to focus on to improve the quality of the schools. As I’ve mentioned before, teaching is a service business. Six Sigma (a highly-respected process for improving quality) says that for a service business the root cause of quality problems are typically either the environment or the method.
Tools of the Mind focuses on the method. A change made with this kind of program doesn’t just last for the life of the program. It lasts, in realistic terms, forever.
This is in sharp contrast to the focus we see from the other side, which is all about attacking teachers and the public schools. People are seldom the root cause of a quality problem in a service business. Focusing on them is a political decision, not a rational one.
And even if, in your wildest dreams, you could improve the schools materially by getting rid of bad teachers (let’s say by getting rid of unions, which are supposedly defending the bad teachers, as if even that were true) the net result over time would be a big, fat F. That’s because teachers (bless them) don’t last forever. At some point they retire or get better jobs or whatever, but then they are replaced from the exact same pool of candidates we get our current teachers from.
So, if you spent a trillion dollars to figure out which teachers are the very worst and got rid of them, within 20 years the effect would evaporate. Fixing the problem this way amounts to a perpetual cost.
Giving the teachers Tools has a one-time cost but returns on that investment forever. And the cost isn’t all that much. It amounts to a bit of training for the teachers. That’s it. It uses the same classrooms and materials as traditional classes.
Please help. When you hear someone whine about teachers and how we can’t get rid of the bad ones, ask if they know about Tools. And then ask them, “How do we give our teachers the best methods to use?” If they get distracted again, gently refer them back to their play plan and ask them, “Method or environment?”
I’m on my way to San Jose for Netroots Nation, so I won’t be able to respond to comments when this posts. But I’ll check responses when I next get a chance.
Hope to see you there!