Public Education
File: c:/Documents and Settings/Dennis/Desktop/Tragedy/PublicEducation.html Date: Wed Jul 30 21:49:43 2014 (C) OntoOO/ Dennis de Champeaux
Public education has been around now for over a century. What is supposed to be achieved remains murky. There are three parties involved who can have potentially different opinions about the goals. The consumers are children and their parents, who get a 'free' service. The paying party is the society who channels tax monies into the third party: the education 'machine'.
The parents have as goal simply the development of their children - whatever the system has decided what the details are. Politicians cater for the parents when they promise in their election programs to improve the public education system without going into the details what is to be done and/or where funds would come from.
The paying party has the unarticulated goal of using the educational system for recognizing special talents and for the others to sort their cognitive skills in order to channel new generations into the vacant positions of the economy. While parents are delighted with increasing the funding for education, the paying party needs to minimize the funding to 'just enough' because tax monies have many other usages.
The third party, which is doing the actual education work, has a tough challenge in an ever changing society. It pays to give attention to what they claim to be their task.
These are all worthwhile goals, all, except #8, aimed at changing children/ students in the right direction. All these goals, except the #20, begs the question how to evaluate a teacher and/or a school regarding actually attaining these goals with #8 exceptionally challenging. This list is a fine example of 20th century well intended, idealistic thinking by the educational establishment. The last item #20 does lend itself to tracking and comparing actual achievements against, against what?
Until recently there were no agreed measurable standards to be achieved. Before elaborating this issue here what another site enumerates as the purposes of public education [TeacherGoals2]:
We encounter here also lofty goals for which tracking of achievements is virtually impossible. The last item (g) does list more topics for which tracking is conceivable. This list continues with sketching how evaluation is to be done:
A standard to be used for tracking and evaluation is explained by "... and any additional academic standards as determined by the school entity". It is a step in the right direction but it does not address the sorry state of American education when international comparisons are done. The battles in the US about teaching evolution and/or creationism - twice in a century - is something we better ignore. Still we mention in passing that a Newsweek issue reported that 25% (in the US) does not know that the Earth circles the Sun once a year. Evolution is accepted (in the US) by 40%. The quality of public education is worrisome according to [Deeptha Thattai]:
A federal report published in 1983 indicated very low academic achievement in public schools.The root cause has been that the party that provides the funding for public education never specified in the 20th century what was to be delivered, hence the lofty, unmeasurable goals above. The 2001 Federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) responded as follows [NCLB]:
NCLB supports standards-based education reform based on the premise that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education.The educational establishment experienced an erosion of their century long autonomy and created the phrase "teaching to the test" thereby suggesting that the quality of education was being compromised. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation went beyond the No Child Left Behind Act by developing a standard Common Core curriculum [CommonCore].The Act requires states to develop assessments in basic skills. To receive federal school funding, states must give these assessments to all students at select grade levels. The Act does not assert a national achievement standard. Each individual state develops its own standards. NCLB expanded the federal role in public education through annual testing, annual academic progress, report cards, teacher qualifications, and funding changes.
Quite astonishing in this context is all the remedial action prescribed (and funded) for poor children (which is justified by the "blank slate" position, i.e. genes can be ignored). The lack of success for these efforts is the paradoxical side-effect of a century long history of public education. In spite of its defects, its sorting function did work and talents were recognized and lifted up from the bottom 50%. Cognitive skills are statistical inheritable. This created ultimately after 4-5 generations a two tiered society: the poor and affluent are divided primarily by respectively being cognitive skills limited and cognitive skills endowed. Denying the role of genes leads to desperate statements [DavidSafier]:
The "A" schools are mainly in the high income areas, the "B" and "C" schools are in the middle class and transitional areas, and the "D" schools are concentrated in the areas of highest poverty. But that shouldn't surprise anyone, because no matter where you go in the world, you'll find a similar correlation between family income and student achievement. As poverty lessens, and with it the stresses and burdens poor children carry with them into school, student achievement increases.The simpler explanation for these correlations are the underlying, inherited genes, which is off limits. Hence an unsatisfactory performance is 'explained' by "the stresses and burdens poor children carry with them into school".
The society and the education system has also difficulty accepting what is now well known in the academic community: different races (and clusters) have different cognitive skills distributions. The consequence is endless debates and endless efforts to upgrade the educational outcomes for disadvantaged sub communities, race based or not, that will have no real effect and that only lead to endless frustrations: [Ventura]:
We cannot afford the achievement gap morally, socially or economically, state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell said. "We know all students can learn no matter what ethnicity, economic status or native language. Now we must confront and change those things that might be in our education system that could be holding some students back."
For example [Flynn effect]:
- "Dutch conscripts gained 21 points in only 30 years, or 7 points per
decade, between 1952 and 1982"
- "Two large samples of Spanish children were assessed with a 30-year
gap. Comparison of the IQ distributions indicated that ... the mean IQ
had increased by 9.7 points"
The experts have discounted these phenotypic results based on the
different cultural exposures that the test subjects had
experienced. The effects measured are unrealistic as argued in
[Flynn effect]:
- "... however Arthur Jensen warns that extrapolating beyond the data
leads to absurd results such as an IQ of -1000 for Aristotle (even
assuming he would have scored 200 in his day)."
The Flynn effect is explained by the notion that societies have/had populations that had cognitive skills potential that was underdeveloped. Allocating more resources to public education helped to more fully unfold these potentials - up to a point. The Flynn effect may have ended in some developed nations starting in the mid 1990s [Teasdale&Owen]:
... report intelligence test results from over 500,000 young Danish men, tested between 1959 and 2004, showing that performance peaked in the late 1990s, and has since declined moderately to pre-1991 levels.A Dutch committee admitted that Dutch children are performing worse: 10% of the children were doing poorly in 2000; this increased to 15% in 2007 [Dijsselbloem].
Estimates of declines at the World level, were the migration effect does not occur, range from two to over ten point on the genotypic IQ scale. These estimates are based on the positive correlation of high fertility and low average IQ of the World's nations. A study about Denmark reports a decline due to the effect of immigration. Yet another study about the UK combines trigger-response time data that spans more than a century with other data that correlates timing data with IQ and estimates a decline of 1.16 IQ point per decade. See the "Appendix genotypic IQ declines" for some details.
Business in the private sector has learned to keep improving its practices and processes to survive in an economy that is becoming more and more global. These practices are based on applying process improvement processes, which can be implicit but are preferably explicitly articulated and installed. Either way the collection of performance metrics is crucial to assess the impact of process interventions. These practices, now themselves standardized, are widely applied and are known as Six Sigma.
Here a sketch of an application in the educational realm that starts
with collecting bench mark data:
-- Define for a certain topic and age group and educational period,
the required prerequisites and the measurable goals to be achieved.
-- Observe the success rates of goal achievements as a function of
recruiting area for a large enough number of cases.
This yields the bench mark to be used in assessing the performance of
a specific teacher on this topic in a specific period with students
that come from a specific recruiting area.
Note that we have eliminated with this example process the unfair disadvantages and advantages associated with a specific recruiting area. Whether or not a school fails or not can now be derived from the measured performances of its teachers.
When these procedures are in place, one can test 'scientifically' the impact of proposed improvements.
Selling Six Sigma processes to the educational system not being monitored for a century is not trivial. Pilot tests, learning what works and where adjustments are required and gradual adoption is the way forward.
Perceiving the essence of education as teaching these soft goals has been a forceful argument for a century against standardized testing of hard goals. Accepting the necessity for tracking progress on the hard goals will open up the development of trackable techniques for teaching the soft goals. Computer assisted instruction can deliver this magic, which will require indeed creativity from the educational system.
[DavidSafier] http://www.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2014/07/11/education-leaders-and-top-democrats-part-company
[Deeptha Thattai] Deeptha Thattai, A History of Public Education in the United States, http://www.servintfree.net/~aidmn-ejournal/publications/2001-11/PublicEducationInTheUnitedStates.html
[Dijsselbloem] http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/article1094496.ece/Ministerie_erkent_daling_onderwijspeil
[Eugenics] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
[Fertility&Intelligence] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
[Flynn] Flynn, J. R. (1994), IQ gains over time. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Encyclopedia of human intelligence (pp. 617-623), New York: Macmillan.
[Flynn effect] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[Gardner] Gardner, H., Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligence, ISBN 0-465-02510-2, 1983.
[Herrnstein&Murray] Herrnstein, R. & C. Murray, Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, A Free Press Paperbacks Book, 1994.
[Lynn] Lynn, R., Dysgenics: Genetic deterioration in modern populations, CT., Praeger: Westport, 1996.
[Lynn&Harvey] Lynn, R. & J. Harvey,
The Decline of the World's Intelligence,
Intelligence, vol 36, pp 112-120, 2008.
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/lynn2008.pdf
[Meisenberg] Meisenberg, G., Wealth, Intelligence, Politics and Global Fertility Differentials, Journal of Biosocial Science, vol 41, pp 519-536, 2009.
[NCLB] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
[Nyborg] Nyborg, H.,
The decay of Western civilization: Double relaxed Darwinian
Selection,
Personality and Individual Differences, in press, 2011.
https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/nyborg-2011-the-decay-of-western-civilization-double-relaxed-darwinian-selection.pdf
[TeacherGoals] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-wolpertgawron/what-is-the-purpose-of-pu_b_774497.html
[TeacherGoals2] http://www.pacode.com/secure/data/022/chapter4/s4.11.html
[Teasdale&Owen] T.W. Teasdale, D.R. Owen, Secular declines in cognitive test scores: a reversal of the Flynn effect, Intelligence 36 (2008) pp 121-126 #123; and: www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/teasdale2008.pdf
[Ventura] http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2007/aug/24/minorities-score-lower-on-state-test/
[Vining] Vining, D., On the possibility of the reemergence of a dysgenic trend with respect to intelligence in American fertility differentials, Intelligence 6 (3): 241-264, 1982.
[Woodley] Woodley, M.A., J. te Nijenhuis & R. Murphy, (2013). Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time, Intelligence in press.
Helmuth Nyborg discusses about Denmark the impact of two sources of IQ decline: dysgenetic fertility and "super fertile low-IQ non-Western immigrants" [Nyborg]. The abstract ends with:
The genotypic IQ decline will ruin the economic and social infrastructure needed for quality education, welfare, democracy and civilization.The author produces a prediction - using modeling - for the IQ development of the total Danish population and for those of the Danish immigrants. A graph shows for the 1979-2072 period the following gradual declines:
A paper by Lynn & Harvey [Lynn&Harvey] gives a list of 192 countries with for each country IQ and fertility estimates. They obtained a decline of 2.44 phenotypic IQ point during 1950-2000.
Woodley et al [Woodley] used two sets of data:
-- The reaction time trend from a multitude of studies during 1889-2004
-- A correlation between reaction time and (genotypic?) IQ
Combining them they arrive at the (astonishing) estimate of a
decline of 1.16 IQ point per decade.
Declines appear to have been rapid. Thus cohorts must have different averages. Our calculations have concentrated on what happens with the trend of only newborns. We arrived at an estimated decline of 7.5 genotypic IQ point during the 20th century, with a close to 4 point margin.
Considering the available evidence, we subscribe to the concept of genotypic IQ declines and that its magnitude has been significant (with, obviously, varying degrees in different regions/ nations of the world). These declines have been compensated for by public education for most of the 20th century [Flynn effect]. Meisenberg [Meisenberg] conjectures however: "Predictably, sometime during the 21st century the average intelligence of the world population will go into stagnation and finally begin to decline."
It is unfortunate that this topic generates heated, irrational exchanges as a result of eugenics practices in the previous century and its association with the Holocaust [Eugenics]. Dismissing the veracity of genotypic IQ declines because of not knowing how to address its (negative) effects, we consider a deplorable example of intellectual paranoia.
Here a simplified characterization of IQ-intelligence: it stands for the ability to deal with symbolic information, the ability to survive in New York City, the ability to do research that can culminate in a Nobel prize.
Different clusters having different IQ-bell-curves need not worry us. The ancestors of the people in a geographic cluster had their genes over time optimized for dealing with the challenges of their geographic region, which can be substantially different from symbolic information processing. And more significantly: success in the society (or happiness) depends on many other skills than raw IQ-intelligence.