I have been reading Dr. Ravitch’s work for a while and want to call it to the attention of people interested in public education.  Why?

A former Bush (both) administration(s) appointee who championed No Child Left Behind and other education reform initiatives,  Dr. Ravitch has reconsidered her views on that legislation and other important public education issues.  Some popular initiatives Dr. Ravitch is now questioning:

• Charter Schools. She has concluded that they are no better than average and draining resources from the public education system.
• Standards/Accountability. She has questioned whether No Child Left Behind standards and curricula have produced lower standards so that most children only appear not to be left behind.
• 21st Century Skills. In September 2009, she gave us a history lesson on why skill-centered education, like the 21st Century Skills initiative so popular here in West Virginia right now, has never worked.

Dr. Ravitch’s September 2009 op-ed commentary in the Boston Globe is a relatively brief document rich with insights about public education:

• “For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on.  But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world.”
• “Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and sythesizing what one has learned.  And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.”
• “The intelligent person, the one who truly is a practitioner of critical thinking, has the capacity to understand the lessons of history, to grasp the inner logic of science and mathematics, and to realize the meaning of philosophical debates by studying them.”

Dr. Ravitch’s views are significantly outside of the current educational mainstream, which happens to consist of a conventional wisdom shared by most Democrats and Republicans alike.  You would think that when most Democrats and Republicans agree on something, they’re probably right.  But Dr. Ravitch will make you “think” otherwise.

The single worst shoot-yourself-in-the-foot act that contributed to our loss of control of education reform happened about 20 years ago. That’s when leaders of business and industry, convinced that educators either didn’t know enough or didn’t care enough about educating the young to be trusted, hijacked our profession. And we let them.

Mr. Brady suggests that we have entrusted our educational system to people who are not professionals.  They think they know how to run a school because they know how to run a business and they attended school as student.

If you’re looking for a surgeon to remove a cancerous growth, a plumber to fix a leaky pipe, an artist to paint a portrait, a caterer to produce a wedding dinner, you don’t dictate which scalpels the surgeon picks up, which wrenches the plumber brings into the house, which brushes the painter will use, or select the caterer’s kitchen utensils.

Mr. Brady suggests that it’s fine for these non-professionals to engage in problem identification, but they should leave solution-identification and implementation to professional educators.

The new leaders were certain they knew what was wrong with America’s schools, and what had to be done to set them right: What was needed were “standards.” Clear, no-nonsense standards. Tough, demanding standards.

Mr. Brady thinks everyone is wasting a lot of time developing curriculum standards.  First, they are unnecessarily narrowing what students need to know. Second, they are encouraging memorization over the development of “an organized, self-reinforcing, dynamic body of knowledge.”  Third, they are stifling the development of new ideas by providing an official list of worthy ideas.

Two recent posts here - The Race to the Bottom and The Race to the Top? – summarize research and analysis that support Mr. Brady’s contentions.

Mr. Body explains Florida’s fundamental premise this way:

Move towards the light and stop spending money on foolish things like – to quote the former mayor of Winnipeg – “pipes, pavement and policies” … and start investing heavily in the arts and technology, then all will be right with the world.

Mr. Body suggests that the solution lies in people, not in government:

Cool communities are cool not because of amenities, but because the people who live in them have made them into their image – their ideal.  Then the silent locutions of contentment become audible for the whole world to hear.  If you go to a town – any town – where the people are amazingly in love with their space, it becomes infectious.  On the flip side of that, if you go to a town where the media and residents are trashing said city, you no doubt will begin to trash it too.

So what are people to do?

If you want to make your city cool, take stock of the good things your town possesses: people product and place.  then, set about an action plan with government way in the background…. The plan should be very simple: How do we hold on to what is good in our society and then expand it?

And my favorite observation …

There are no committees in New Orleans seeking outsiders to come save us from ourselves.  Our self-esteem is not that low….  I am not going to move to a town that is sending me this message: We are desperate…. Please come and save us.

Troy Body may be a half-bubble off plumb, but he’s one cool dude, too – and offers an effective antidote to GroupThink.

In his new book The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, W. Brian Arthur questions our notion of that great buzzword “innovation.”  Says Arthur:

There isn’t a deep understanding of innovation out there.  And I think you can see that because the way innovation is described is very hand-wavy, and-then-something-creative-happens.  All societies want to be innovative, but in the absence of any deep idea of innovation, governments and companies tend to run after what seems to be the latest idea; that if you somehow have, ‘creativity,’ or invest in R&D, or set up industrial parks, that’s going to work.

In his book review, Lee Drutman explains the book’s basic argument this way:

New technology is just combining old technologies in new ways.  And all technology is, at its core, simply the harnessing of nature and its manifold phenomena for human needs.

He goes on to say:

The key implication … is that … innovations do not come out of nowhere.  ”There are not magic wands or bright ideas in bathtubs,” Arthur said….  Rather, innovation is something that comes from the hard work of decades and decades of education and training.  It is something that comes from devoting lots of resources to universities and investing in loads of basic science.

In other words, there is no “magic” shortcut to business innovation, contrary to what you might hear at the next economic development conference you attend.

The history of American higher education is well supplied with reform movements that have gone nowhere.  Despite fervent calls for change in a number of areas, most often issued by a commission with an impressive masthead, nothing much happens – or worse, the only visible result is hurt feelings and a hunkering down by the college leaders on whom change depends.

Of all the groups I have dealt with over the years, higher education is the most resistant to change, which may seem counter-intuitive given that The Academy is supposed to be all about thinking the great thoughts.  But it is about precisely that – thinking, not changing.

Like outside reformers, state agencies cannot prescribe change (unless they are prepared for a long, exhausting battle) but must create the conditions that make change possible… The nature of the academy sucks the air out of piecemeal reforms.

More than anyone in West Virginia higher education over the last few years, I was involved in those lll-ooo-nnn-ggg, exhausting battles with the Death Eaters and have two observations.  First, don’t focus primarily on trying to build consensus from within The Academy.  You’ll accomplish more by hitting your head against a wall repeatedly.  Second, you really can create the conditions that make change possible – just look at how West Virginia’s community college system has been transformed over the last 5 years (a subject for some future blog posts, I suspect).

… and most important …

The problem, as the economist Richard Vedder and others have noted, is that the classic rules of supply and demand apply at best imperfectly to higher education. In a market so awash with federal money—for research support, for grants and loans to students and parents—competitive pressures aren’t sufficient to change the system.

That’s the real issue: there is little change – and tuition costs are going through the roof – because The Academy is very well insulated from the effects of the market.  In my experience, the two higher education groups most receptive to change – academic research and community colleges - actually prove the rule.  Why?  They are expected to be entrepreneurial and address real-world concerns.  If they do not, their “business” models do not work very well.  Over time, we will follow the money … and thus gain a better understanding of higher education’s strengths and weaknesses.

• First, Ms. Neal castigates the Association of Governing Board’s (AGB’s) “Survey of Higher Education Governance.” I must admit that I had been puzzled when I first saw a list of AGB’s supposed five major higher education issues, according to board trustees, several weeks ago.  Not only was the football team’s record (or even athletics more generally) missing from the top of the list; it was not even ON the list.  (Seriously, I wouldn’t expect athletics to be at the top of the list, but I would expect it to be on the list.)   It turns out that, in an effort to figure out what trustees think is important, AGB surveyed, not trustees, but presidents and other administrators.
• Ms. Neal also criticizes HigherEdThink on the proper role of boards:  “According to this view, higher ed administrations are the governance structure. Trustees for the most part should keep to their place and do as they are told by administrators. One might call it the potty-trained trustee….” She goes on to illustrate how pervasive the conventional wisdom is by pointing to a question on the survey that assumes that presidents select their own board members (their bosses!!!), which they frequently do.  She also – very rightly – points out that private sector boards have been headed diametrically in the opposite direction over the last few years thanks to Sarbanes-Oxley, Enron, etc. and wonders why higher education has not been paying any attention.
• Third, Ms. Neal identifies the first of two issues concerning which board members should be paying particular attention:  Current levels of higher education expenditure are unsustainable.  Higher education costs are increasing at a faster clip than health care costs and a much faster clip than either personal income or consumer prices.  Ms. Neal knows this trend cannot continue.  She also knows that too many administrators’ heads are buried in the sand when it comes to meaningful cost controls.  She thinks boards made up of people who have had to operate within a profit-and-loss statement’s bottom line could provide meaningful leadership on this front.
• Fourth, Ms. Neal identifies a role for board members in the academic arena.  She thinks board members need to push The Academy to evaluate learning meaningfully and address issues like grade inflation.  As Ms. Neal is well aware, the pressure to evaluate learning has come almost exclusively from outside The Academy in recent years, and no one can seem to tell you much about whether a student learned anything while attending college.

Over the next several weeks and months, I will discuss at greater length some of the main points that Ms. Neal raises.  All are very relevant to West Virginia’s higher education system and some are key to escaping from the received wisdom of “HigherEdThink.”

PS: My favorite statistic from the AGB report: For 64% of private institution boards, the full board is told the president’s compensation … which logically means that in 36% of cases, the full board is not told and does not know the president’s compensation.  How on earth could you claim to be fulfilling your fiduciary duty to the institution if you aren’t told the president’s salary?  It makes you wonder what else those trustees are not told – a lot, I suspect.