Teaching arithmetic. That's a pedagogical problem, maybe an economic problem, but is it a political problem? I think it is, and the reason highlights what I hate most about the No Child Left Behind act.
Kevin Drum notes that, regardless of political affiliation, everybody hates the NCLB, the monstrosity foisted upon the country by one of last truly bipartisan legislative teams, which included liberal Ted Kennedy and right winger George Bush, and others in between.
There are many reasons to hate it, which may vary depending upon your political persuasion. The reason I hate it is bipartisan, since both sides of the aisle, like the original sponsors of the bill, have bought into the same destructive model of education that it imposes.
Last week, I came across a pedagogical experiment that clearly illustrates how this destruction operates.
The experiment
It's not a new experiment - it's from 1929, but it was recently resurrected on Peter Gray’s blog on Psychology Today last week. As long as we fail to adequately take into account the results of such experiments (and it's eighty years and counting for this one), then the bipartisan trashing of schools and inability to effect actual change will probably continue.
This 1929 experiment came about because of the relentless piling-on of more and more curricula into the school day, regardless of the time actually available to deal with it, a problem that's only gotten worse since then. Something had to go, so they ejected traditional arithmetic instruction altogether in grades one through five. Mind you, they only tried this in the poorest schools of the school district involved, since those communities lacked the political clout to mount the inevitable counter-attack against this change. That interesting point is probably best left to some other diary, however.
The time saved by eliminating arithmetic was mainly filled with language development activities -- discussions about topics that might interest the students, in which the students were asked to not only have opinions, but justify them -- that sort of thing. The teachers also made sure that the kids did have experiences with the sort of day-to-day number tasks that they might actually have to employ in their young lives.
The Results
By the end of the fifth grade, the experimental students (naturally) seemed hopelessly behind in arithmetical calculations, though they actually surpassed their traditionally-instructed peers in solving what we would today call "story problems" or "word problems," so long as the numerical values involved were relatively simple, of course.
Formal arithmetic instruction began in sixth grade and by the end of sixth grade (ten months later), the experimental subjects' arithmetic skills fully equaled those of students elsewhere in the district, plus they retained their advantage in solving story problems. By most standards, then, the kids who didn't study formal arithmetic in grades one through five came out ahead in arithmetic at the end of sixth grade.
Think about it. They learned in one year what had taken everybody else five or six years. And while their peers were numbing their minds with years of drill and kill arithmetic tasks, they took part in stimulating discussions and learned to think logically.
How this applies to education
The most direct lesson from this experiment, of course, is that there is an optimal age for teaching formal arithmetic and that sixth grade is closer to that age than younger grades.
This was no surprise to me, since, when I studied developmental educational psychology long ago, I found that the overwhelming bulk of experts and experimental studies had already demonstrated that such optimal ages exist.
The key concept is that, particularly when we're talking about young kids, the mind is never a blank slate, despite what Locke might say. Furthermore, the slate is never unstructured, liable to acquire just any form of information at any time, despite what Pavlovand B. F. Skinner might say.
Instead, the mind starts out organized, and develops further from that point, much as what Chomsky, Piaget, Lorenz, or Vygotskymight say. This developmental growth can be stifled or promoted by various environmental factors, of course, but the best educational practice should be aimed at promoting growth along the lines already programmed into it, rather than working at cross purposes.
It's like the ancient Chinese practice of foot binding. Yes, you can shape that foot into a tiny little permanent high heel if you want to, and you might even think it's interesting or beautiful when used for walking. But, appearances aside, if you really want robust walking out of that foot, you better promote its development some other way.
A second relevant example
Lest somebody dismiss the results of this experiment as simply a fluke, I'd like to mention an example taken from the other end of the poor-elite spectrum of schools.
Many years before the Internet took off, I used to participate in a FidoNet"newsgroup" about elementary school education. One of the participants was a man who taught at Sudbury Valley School.
Sudbury Valley School is a democratically governed private school with no set curriculum. Students and staff together govern activities. Strict procedural rules guide decision making, but everything else is debatable. About thirty other schools have developed along their model.
This Sudbury teacher (whose name escapes me twenty years later) had some 12-to-13-year-old students who noticed that their peers in other schools could perform a mysterious calculation called "long division." They wanted to learn it, too. Together, they mapped out a course of study. It lasted (if I remember correctly - it has been a long time) three weeks. In any case, in a matter of a few weeks, they had totally mastered long division of any two numbers.
Contrast that to so many of our our kids in grades 4-5-6-7, hour after hour, year after year, writing out "drill and kill" exercises, in a sort of Skinnerian struggle to make long division "sink in" (and even then, for many of them, it never sinks).
So should we eliminate formal arithmetic in elementary school, then?
So should elementary school arithmetic go? Of course not.
In the first place, it's a useless question, a non-starter. Kids are precious. Most communities would rightly question risking their children's future on something so contrary to common sense without proof that's both overwhelming and pervasive enough to make it the new common sense. That's not going to happen anytime soon.
Secondly, lots of kids (in absolute terms, if not in percentages) in normal schools learn to formally divide any two numbers when they're two or three grades below sixth grade. Why should they wait? One-size-fits-all is not a concept appropriate to human shoes, let alone human minds.
Furthermore, there are lots of things you can do short of something so radical as dropping formal arithmetic in elementary school. I personally believe that appropriate ways to teach arithmetic in the lower grades do exist. What makes them appropriate is that they take the true developmental processes of learning into account.
For example, in several books that ought to be popular, Constance Kamii, a professor in Birmingham, Alabama with her own website, has outlined the kind of program that I believe would be worthwhile. If you're curious, her books include: Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic, Young Children Continue to Reinvent Arithmetic - second grade, and Young Children Continue to Reinvent Arithmetic - third grade.
Arithmetic taught that way would produce better results, I think, than both the 1929 study and the Sudbury schools, as well as the best-performing public schools today.
What does all this have to do with the NCLB?
There are many problems with the NCLB. What most people fail to realize, though, is that its basic effect is to strengthen a curricular structure in education that's sometimes as unnatural as it is traditional. It's like those mincing Chinese ladies of ancient times, who tip-toed along for hundreds of years because of traditional standards of beauty. (and don't let's get started about the anorexic young women of today)
It's unnatural because it fails to take actual human development into account. The same defect also occurs with the individual testing programs in the various states that feed into it, as well as the instructional programs sold by traditional textbook companies. For that matter, most people probably buy into this educational frame, if only because it seems to be traditional and "common sense."
They all fail to take actual human development into account, and would never even entertain the outlandish idea that, at least in some cases, one might consider delaying formal arithmetic until the end of elementary school. This highlights the importance of actual experimental results to challenge our thinking. (On the other hand, who would donate their kids to such an experiment?)
It's patently obvious, though, that education must have developmental aspects. A complex skill like long division, for example, is logically composed of many simpler skills, coordinated together. Anyone can see that.
However, because people are taken in by the ideas of Locke and Skinner, they assume that the simple logical/arithmetical skills that combine to create long division are identical to the mental skills that actual human brains use in order to learn the task. They are not. Human mental skills proceed and develop from the primitive skills a baby inherits from its parents, not from some elegant mathematical construct bound up around them, no matter how logically consistent or intrinsically beautiful it is to those who already have developed such skills.
Furthermore, even if those actual prerequisite mental skills were acknowledged, everyone assumes that you can just lay them out into an evenly-spaced schedule throughout a young child's elementary school career. And if you think the kids might have trouble learning something complicated, then you simply start them a year earlier.
However, actual human minds do have optimal times for learning things, and even if they didn't, they still don't develop at a constant rate, even from one skill to the next. So anytime the component skills are scheduled at an even rate, you guarantee a poor fit somewhere along the line.
Procrustean Education
Abandoning shoe metaphors for the moment, I'd suggest that the typical course of study in American elementary schools, whether public, private, or in the home, is like a Procrustean bed. If you're the wrong size for the bed, you're simply stretched with ropes or shortened with knives until you do.
I like to call it the Procrustean Educational Model (TM). Others might call it "grade level standards" or "the assembly-line model." It's a rigid sequence of educational goals spread throughout the career of an elementary school student. It focuses on the curriculum to be learned rather than the student who must learn it, attaching each individual goal to mythical "grade levels," a concept with little intrinsic reality. Though it fails to take normal mental development into account, the student had still better find some way to <ahem> shoehorn themselves into it!
In the Procrustean (grade level) model, internal efficiencies of curriculum presentation take precedence over the efficiencies of how people actually learn. The result (for example) is that you often get more math anxiety than math achievement.
I sometimes wonder if the populace, at least at a subconscious level, is already aware of this Procrustean quality of education in America. Maybe this accounts for the mania some people have about getting their kids to learn things at ever younger ages, so they can get out from under it before the shackles bind them to the bed.
Wait a minute, though! If this is a structural problem common to the culture, pervasive throughout the entire system of thought and regulation, including private schools and home schools, why single out the NCLB as the big bad guy?
Because it has teeth to enforce its destruction, that's why.
Softening the Procrustean Bed
Throughout my 30 years of teaching, the vast majority of the teachers I've known have embraced ever more developmentally-appropriate methods of education, not because they're fashionable, but because they work. Lots of teachers buy Constance Kamii's books, for example, and she's just one of many authors who publish educational works that deal with actual humans.
The downside is that such methods often don't work according to the Procrustean schedule of education that's implied by testing structures supported by the NCLB, and often they work most plainly in skill areas that, while useful or even essential to actual living, can't be evaluated on a multiple-choice test.
Until the NCLB passed, teachers usually had some flexibility in adapting programs to accommodate real humans (students, that is), and even grant them access to courses that they really liked and valued, to further support their natural love of learning. (and yes, all young students have a natural love of learning, though it can be beaten out of them if you try hard enough)
Teachers could make these adjustments and accommodations because the standardized test results had few serious consequences to the school or the teachers' careers. All that changed with the NCLB.
Nowadays, being a teacher is something like being a doctor in a hospital where the directors only believe in the treatments available when Locke was alive. Not only that, any cure must proceed according to the standard time line. No miracle cures nor extended convalescences allowed!
And that is why I hate the NCLB.
Where does politics fit into this pedagogical debate?
Since Dailykos is, after all, a political blog . . .
Obviously, abolishing the NCLB is a political act. Beyond that, anything that replaces it is also political. But I also think it's a political act to find out more about how people actually learn.
Sure, you can have a full life without knowing what a Language Acquisition Device is, or what Concrete Operational thinking and Formal Operational thinking are, or understanding the necessity for cognitive dissonance in educational settings.
You can also have a full life without knowing about collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and dead peasant insurance, and look what that kind of ignorance has cost us so far.
And believe me, educational reform is a much more complex problem than health care reform (which really only needs to reform delivery) or financial system reform (which mainly needs to abolish secrecy and criminal conduct, and re-institute Glass-Steagall-type regulations, with maybe a touch of trust-busting).
In education, huge numbers of people are still buying into a Procrustean model with little basis in reality, while studies establishing the reality of learning either don't exist, or actually, they may exist but they're never brought to the table. Changing the educational game, when you can't even agree where the goal is, will not be easy.
My final anecdote
In all of this, I am reminded of one of my professors in my first teacher credentialing program, three decades ago. He laughingly told us that very little had been established beyond controversy in scientific educational studies so far - there always seemed to be a counter-example to everything. However, there was one exception, an idea long established beyond doubt from experiments performed, again, in the 1920's.
That idea was that formal instruction in spelling had but negligible effect, for good or ill, on how well a person spelled when actually composing written works, though it could make some small differences in test scores on multiple-choice or similar tests.
We all had a good laugh because we knew that formal spelling instruction was as common as ever. Thirty years later, when not much has changed and many kids still lug around meaningless spelling workbooks, it's not quite so funny. There's even a corollary to math anxiety -- people so defensive of their own bad spelling that you criticize it at your peril. So let's not further enshrine and fossilize such nonsense through the No Child Left Behind act.
Anyway. Flame off. If you read all or part of what I wrote here, thank you for your consideration.