Ars Docendi

Much has been made of a recent study[1] that shows a correlation between the “effectiveness” of teachers as determined by the scoring of their students on “value-added metrics” and these students’ success in their later lives as determined by “markers.”  This muchness put me in mind—again—of Flannery O’Connor’s remark that “[t]he devil of educationalism that possesses us is the kind that can be cast out only by prayer and fasting.” I am not so sanguine as O’Connor: even prayer and fasting don’t seem to work! I keep wondering what could possess whole communities of people to be stunned by a complex statistical study embodying years of data on millions of students when it concludes that children with good teachers do better than children with bad. One of the devils in the legion seems to be rather dim, but I will try to give the devil his due.

The original report is impressive in its thoroughness and the care with which its authors make and qualify their claims. They note, for example, that teachers in the study were not “incentivized based on test scores,” thereby skirting the effect of cheating, teaching to tests, and other “distortions in teacher behavior” that make the basis of value-addition different from what it would be in a population whose members had been “incentivized”—that is, in the real world of Campbell’s Law. There is no guarantee that results like this study’s would be similar to those in a district whose teachers were looking over their shoulders at the Value-added Reaper as he made his progress through their ranks. The twofold problem is that the use of “value-added metrics” encourages teaching to tests (the most-purchased books in the New York schools are books of preparation for tests), and there is evidence in research as well as the educational experience of the human race that teachers who teach to tests get worse results than teachers who don’t.

They caution that some elements of the value-added equation require “observing teachers over many school years” and may not apply in a “high stakes environment with multitasking and imperfect monitoring”—that is, precisely, the kind of environment in which hasty “consequential decisions” will be made on the basis of imperfect applications of the equation over the short term.

They point out as a justification for their aggregate numbers that “observable characteristics are sufficiently rich so that any remaining unobserved heterogeneity is balanced across teachers,” but those who want to use “value-added metrics” to make consequential decisions will be applying the equation to particular individuals without correction for “unobserved heterogeneity.”

They note that their study did not include the effect of peers and of parental investment in value-addition. While everyone agrees that the teacher’s effect on what students learn is pronounced, this seems like a significant omission, particularly if the alternative is that these effects are significant but not included in the metric by which teachers are evaluated.

The authors state that the study’s assumptions “rule out the possibility that teacher quality fluctuates across years.” Can this be? Raise your hand if your quality was as good in your first year of teaching as in your tenth.

In addition to what the authors say in qualification and limitation of their results, I have a few questions. They say that “value added is difficult to predict based on teacher observables.” Do the people who want to use value-added metrics as the basis for personnel decisions want to go a step farther and assert that there is nothing observable that a teacher can actually learn or plan to do or avoid that will make a difference in how she or he scores?  This seems like a bizarre position for someone who believes in life-long learning.

I want to understand in non-mathematical terms how “academic aptitude” is factored into the equation so that teachers will not be “penalized” for taking classes of difficult or refractory students. It seems to be a single number (η_i) in the equation, but how is it derived?

I would like to know how many years’ value-added ratings they think a teacher should receive before the ratings can be said to reflect his or her actual performance, and I would like to understand the basis for this determination. It is one thing to say that we have some aggregate statistics that show teachers in general have certain effects on their students in the long run, and a rather different thing to say that these statistics can reliably rate individual teachers in one or two goes. This is particularly true given that the authors themselves say some elements of the value-added equation require “observing teachers over many school years.”

Having asked my questions I now make a couple of observations. One of the study’s authors, according to The New York Times, says that value-added metrics should be used even though “mistakes will be made” and “despite the uncertainty and disruption involved.” It is disturbing to see someone so fastidious in the drawing of conclusions become so sweeping and remorseless in applying them, particularly when the study itself has just spoken to the need to “weigh the cost of errors in personnel decisions against the mean benefit from improving teacher value-added.”

The problem with “mean benefits” is that they have particular consequences. The authors have said that they think it would be more cost-effective to fire ineffective teachers (even mistakenly ineffective ones) than to give bonuses to effective ones. I keep wondering whether this kind of decision-making will be ethos-effective. I keep wondering who is going to be attracted to a profession governed by such principles and assumptions as those that lie behind value-added systems. “Drifters and misfits,” as Hofstadter called them? The authors of the study note that no observable teacher behavior correlates to value addition, so I wonder who will join a profession in which it cannot be said with confidence what he needs to do in order to be successful.

The moral and intellectual world in which the discernment of quality was a matter of finesse or connoisseurship and in which reward and reprobation follow particular deeds or ways of doing things is the same one in which we could say without a quantitative rationalization that the students of good teachers do better than the students of bad. That world is also a place where both teachers and administrators take their duties seriously, including the duty to counsel and correct when needed and to accept counsel and correction when deserved or needed.

It might be worth ending with a note on the stereotype that people who are against value-added “measurement” are unionists, educational bureaucrats, or people with tenure to lose in a change of system. In my twenty-five years as a teacher I have never worked within a tenure-granting system.  I have never been in a union shop, nor have I been a member of a teachers’ union. I have never held an administrative position in education except that of Department Head. I have never worked in a teachers’ college. If I am against the kind of practice discussed in this posting, it is not because I have a hidden interest. It is because it seems wrong. I mean both wrong-headed and culpable.

It’s time to stop using the expression “brick-and-mortar school” as if there is any other kind. I mean in particular to oppose the terms “virtual” and “on-line” being applied to schools, for such network-connections-and-data-bases don’t act as schools except in a threadbare and impoverished sense.

Or are they even as good as threadbare? The standard of “progress” mandated by No Child Left Behind, described generously as “very crude” by Professor Gary Miron of Western Michigan University, would qualify as threadbare. And yet applying even that standard, a recently released study co-authored by Professor Miron showed that on-line “schools” did worse at “improving” their students than “brick-and-mortar” schools did. (It also showed that for-profit “schools” did worse than non-profit schools.)

The late sociologist James S. Coleman did a large study reported in his 1987 book Public and Private High Schools. In it he found that the single strongest correlate of effectiveness in ordinary high-school education was that the schools in which the effective education took place were functional communities. A network is not a community, though some communities do function partially through networks. There is certainly nothing communitarian in an arbitrarily collected group of young people sitting by mandate in front of screens. Nor do such groups bear any resemblance to the ad hoc groupings (not communities) sometimes found on social networks, whose members make a choice to share some limited interest or focus. That is one reason we distinguish between communities and interest groups or single-interest constituencies; but we should also distinguish between networks and any of those other collections, for a network need have none of the above.

For something to be “virtual” in the traditional sense, it must operate under some kind of power or agency (a “virtue”) that has an essential and sufficient effect even though the thing in question does not take its usual form. What essential and sufficient agency is at work in a “virtual” school? Surely the answer can’t be “instruction”! Of the three kinds of learning—knowledge, skill, and understanding—educational software can hope to deliver only knowledge. Skill requires coaching, and the last time I looked, almost all coaches were genuine human beings, for how could they not be in order to adapt themselves to their students’ needs? And the promotion of understanding requires Socratic questioning, which software cannot provide, for something like the reason that it cannot play a good game of gō.

When I think of software providing understanding, it puts me in mind of the electronic confessional in THX 1138. The Donald Pleasance character receives “understanding” from his “confessor,” but the movie invites us not to congratulate the effectiveness of future cybernetics but to mourn the threadbareness of a life to which that “confessor” could offer anything significant.

In the most famous example of Socratic questioning, Socrates himself hears his acquaintance Thrasymachus assert that justice is the interest of the stronger party. Socrates asks him a series of questions whose answers lead Thrasymachus to understand that justice cannot possibly be what he has just claimed. Socrates holds him to each answer he gives by asking one more question about that answer till Thrasymachus grasps fully why he was in error to make that assertion. This is not something that can be programmed because—in real life, if not in a dialogue planned by Plato—the programmer cannot know what a respondent’s next answer will be to an open-ended question, and it is these open-ended questions that force the respondent to step out of the box of slogans and memorized lines that he brought to the discussion. Until then, “justice” might as well be the montillation of traxoline.

Good teachers understand all of this, which is why some teachers in Idaho (and elsewhere) are protesting the mandating of online “schooling.” One of them, Ms. Ann Rosenbaum, sounds like a formidable person and a dedicated teacher, and one not to shrink from a struggle. It is a pity that she must come up against such sorry adversaries as Idaho’s governor Otter and its schools superintendent Luna. Luna falls back on vacuous clichés like “schools of the 21^st century,” while Otter says that if Ms. Rosenbaum “only has an abacus in her hand, she is missing the boat.” Of course, that is not the only thing that Ms. Rosenbaum has in her hand, as the article shows. (Thankfully, it doesn’t show what Governor Otter has in his hand.)

But she doesn’t need anything in her hand when she is using the Socratic method: “engag[ing] students with questions” and “using each answer to prompt the next” question. Of all the questions Socrates asks Thrasymachus, only the first one could appear on question-and-answer software. Ms. Rosenbaum doesn’t want to give up a rich line of questioning for haring around fields of knowledge with questions asked arbitrarily, which is basically what question-and-answer software does.

A “virtual school” is not a community, nor can it be one. It does not have a sufficiency of action by virtue of which it offers a complete education. It will provide coaching for skill at about the same time that country clubs can replace the pro shop by the machine shop. It cannot impart or ratify understanding. Why are we calling it a “school,” and why are we moving towards such things? I am afraid the answers to these questions have little or nothing to do with education. While we are turning up the answers, let us refrain from “saying the thing that is not,” as Jonathan Swift called it[1]; for an on-line “school” is not a school.

May your classroom be full, but not too full, of eager students.

May your students not be jaded.

May they have had a good night’s sleep.

May they greet you when they come in and bid you goodbye when they leave.

May they look you in the eye but not get in your face.

May they never say “whatever.”

May they get their work done—by themselves.

May the sparks in their lives be of interest not notes.

May their parents appreciate what you do for them.

May your classroom not enchain you with gadgets or constrain you with needless routines.

May its main source of light be sunshine.

May your bag of tricks be bottomless.

May the only added value in your life be the value added to your abundantly deserved retirement accounts.

May your administrators be educators.

May they see the paradox in preparing individual students for standardized tests.

May they not think that schools are a business or education a product.

May your school’s mission be expressible in under ten words, none of them a superlative.

May nothing in your building leak.

May your school’s network work.

May you be possessed of the serenity to accept the human condition and the keenness to relish the good things you have.

branding irony: a description or name chosen for its public relations value that is the opposite of what is actually the case with the thing named, as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Value Added Learning

era (n): 1. a brief period of time. a. in education, the time between the introduction of a great new reform like value-added learning and the point when it is cast off as unworkable. 2. (obsolete) any long period of time seen in light of a unifying factor

eternity (n.): in a school’s faculty room, the period before everything works as well and looks as nice as it does in the administrative offices.

failure (n): a key to success. The idea of building grit and building self-control … you get … through failure, and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.—Dominic Randolph, Headmaster, Riverdale Country School, New York. Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential—J. K. Rowling in her commencement address at Harvard.

profit (n): a tangible or intangible gain. non-profit education: teaching for the benefit of students. for-profit education: the simulation of teaching for the benefit of investors.

As I write this, it is 37°F/3°C and raining in Helsinki, Finland. Fortunately, educators wanting to stay dry and save money on international fact-finding missions need not head for distant stormy weather. Instead they may go to Rockville Centre, New York (49°F/9° and partly sunny), where Diane Ravitch reports that South Side High School, a public high school, has “closed the achievement gap,” or is closing it, between its white and Asian students and its black and Latino students. Moreover, it has done so without tracking and without fund-doping by businessmen’s foundations. Best of all, these improvements, having taken place and been sustained over a number of years, look solid and believable, so unlike the overnight wonders and nocturnal remissions touted by the Instant Solutions balonists[1] in government and among the oh-so-helpful foundations. And, as Ravitch points out, Rockville Centre is “closer than Finland.”

It is against this backdrop of success that Carol Burris, the principal of South Side, wrote an open letter with another principal that has since been signed by over 650 principals from around New York State protesting RAce to the Top (RAT) and value-added learning. Principals protesting! Hardly are the words out when I race down Memory Lane to Mr. Wood, Mr. Bemis, Mr. Miller, Mr. Searles, and Sister St. Joan. Protest? What can have happened between their principalships and now? Readers of these postings will know, but it is one thing to read about a misbegotten policy and another to realize that it is forcing a state’s educators into open opposition.

I don’t think we will see Occupy the Lyndon Baines Johnson DOE Building just yet, but it will be fascinating to see how this disagreement plays out. The Department of Education’s approach attracted a wonderfully pungent comment from Mario Fernandez, a New York principal, who said, “They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.” Pan shot of schoolhouse wreckage with Lena Horne singing “Stormy Weather.” Fade to South Side High School.

* * *

Meanwhile, Rick Roach, a member of the Orange County, Fla. (68°F/20°C), Board of Education decided to sit down to the standardized tests of 10^th-grade math and reading mandated in his school district. To his chagrin he got ten math answers right out of 60, and, he thought, those only by guesswork. He scored 62% on the reading test, which makes him barely passable—this though in his main line of work he has a position of responsibility in a large organization for which he has to “make sense of complex data” related to his responsibilities.

He notes with some indignation that the math test is used as part of the basis for counseling students into or away from college preparation (and, I fear, for evaluating teachers’ success in their work). He suggests that the test should have more of the kind of math used in the “real world,” whatever that is; and while I can understand his upset, I think this suggestion is somewhat misguided. More to the point in my mind is his complaint that the tests are being used without accountability. I don’t think he means the accountability of teachers through RAT and other “data” “proving” their high crimes and misdemeanors. Rather, he means an intellectual justification of the tests and of the precise use to which they are actually being put. Readers of this posting of mine may wonder whether that is possible. Readers of this posting, in which Valerie Strauss interviews Mr. Roach, will see that he has some serious and clearly stated objections to the test itself that should be carefully considered by people like those to whom Ms. Burris’s letter is addressed. Who knows that such study and attention won’t be the prelude to some educational climate change?

We seem to proceed as individuals and as groups by keeping a kind of balance between, on the one hand, our mental tendency to find (or create) structures and systems in whose stability and truth we can repose and, on the other, our tendency to leave those structures behind and “seek a great perhaps,” from which new patterns, structures, systems and truth emerge. When we stop proceeding, it is either because these structures have made us rigid and immobile, or because we stall or rattle around aimlessly, a perhaps turning out to have been a perhaps-not. A good education should therefore help us to know or become a part of some of these systems and structures while at the same time equipping us (or leaving us) with the means to seek our perhapses, great or otherwise.

That being the case, if David Weinberger is right that “knowledge…is going the way of the recording industry” and that “knowledge,” as a term, “won’t survive the generation,” we are looking at a prospect of serious imbalance between two of the main complementary aims of life. That is because knowledge in any useful sense has an institutional or formal aspect or component, whether created specially, found, or adapted. There are two extreme alternatives. One is the ossified knowledge—“caked wisdom,” as Barzun calls it—within ossified structures and institutions. The other, which Weinberger’s writing appears to predict, is the mind of Jorge Borges’s Funes the Memorious, which Funes himself calls a “garbage heap” and which I might call in this context a dysfunctional democracy of perhapses. As custodians of education we should examine the direction schooling is taking in order to prevent or minimize the extent of the disaster.

It is in this context that I propose we treat “information literacy” and the “democracy of information” with caution. For every one person gifted in powers of synthesis and creation who will gain from productive travel through the “big, blooming buzz of confusion,” there will be many who rattle around there, ending repeatedly in doleful perhaps-nots. For every John Campbell who grows rich “grazing the common of literature” we will have an awful lot of aimless cud-chewing, or worse:

From Blank to Blank—
A Threadless Way
I pushed Mechanic feet—
To stop—or perish—or advance—
Alike indifferent—

If end I gained
It ends beyond
Indefinite disclosed—
I shut my eyes—and groped as well
‘Twas lighter—to be Blind—[1]

The old British saying “Slowly slowly catchee monkey” is the beginning of wisdom in “educational reform,” but let us also add “Thinkee thinkee catchee monkey.” Unfortunately, that is not the way some education organizations see it, and so we get education “reforms” undertaken precipitately with poor thinking behind them, leaping intrepidly forward into a mess.

In Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, as our hero strikes his Faustian bargain with Mephistophélès, an eerie chord sounds in the orchestra. One day recently, as I looked at the guidelines for submitting a proposal for a RAce to the Top (RAT) Grant on pages 18171 – 18185 of the Federal Register, I felt that if I had been examining those pages as a preliminary to signing on for a RAT Grant, I would have heard a similar eerie chord menace my determination.

Ask good teachers or administrators what the chief difficulty in their jobs is, and you will probably hear that they do not have enough time to do the job. Another likely complaint, which I must give as a Brit might say it, is that there is “too much bumf[1].” Reading the DOE’s estimate that it takes 2735-1/2 hours to complete a RAT grant application sounds a menacing chord in my apprehensive mind: if it takes more hours than the average person works in a year to complete the application, what will it take to implement the program? For an unfortunate answer, see below.

The chord would become more insistent in the mind of a thinking educator who reads[2] that the grantee must have as an “absolute priority” the intention to “measure” student “knowledge and skills” across a set of standards, including those “against which student achievement has been traditionally difficult to measure.” The inquiring skeptic wants to know what happened to understanding in addition to knowledge and skill as a component of “achievement.” He asks why measuring some standards would be “traditionally difficult.” Maybe the difficulty here is not traditional but ontological.

To help understand why, consider by analogy a trip to the Louvre to “measure the achievement” of the Mona Lisa. Imagining Thomas Hoving, clipboard and rubric in hand, in front of the picture before passing judgment should help us to see where the problem lies: We must be careful about what we mean when we say “measure achievement.” We must leave ourselves open to the possibility that some judgments  (and some achievements!) have nothing to do with measurement, period. Instead, they have to do with know-how or connoisseurship and are handled non-quantitatively. Exploring how to apply such thinking to students’ work must be done slowly—maybe even more slowly than filling out the RAT grant application.

But that is not what the good people of Tennessee did. In their haste to be first off the mark at implementing a RAT program, they came up with what sounds like a nightmarish scheme of evaluating—well, yes, students, but also their teachers. I will briefly mention a few outstanding horrors in what I read here and here (The New York Times and Education Week):

Plans for single lessons requiring 4 – 12 hours for an experienced teacher to prepare were rejected as insufficient before being rewritten.

In subjects that do not have “measurements” available for students’ “achievement,” teachers were assessed, and held accountable for, students’ scores on tests unrelated to the subject they teach. For example, a music teacher was held accountable by a test of her students’ writing, which was presumably taught by their writing teacher. You read that right.

Principals must evaluate each teacher five times a year in a process that includes a 20-minute pre-observation discussion, a one-period observation, and a 20-minute debriefing. Assuming a 50-minute lesson and a faculty of 65 teachers, a principal would have to spend about fourteen hours of contact time a week with teachers for their evaluations alone, whether they were good or bad. That doesn’t include the paperwork, which one Tennessee principal estimates to take him four extra hours a day.

I don’t mean to single out Tennessee as a locus of miseducation. My own experience one year was illustrative. We were preparing for our school’s re-accreditation and had foolishly volunteered to establish “measurable goals” to reach as part of the process. We came up with goals and “measurements” as required. When interviewed by the school’s Measurement Honcho, I said that these “measurements” didn’t measure what we claimed they did, and that what they did measure, they measured badly. My warning and advice were disregarded. When the re-accreditation team finally visited and then issued its preliminary report, it found that our “measurements” did not measure what we claimed they did, and that what they did measure, they measured badly.

Such inadequacy seems so obvious in retrospect that one wonders what is the difficulty in looking ahead. I have some thoughts. First, the impetus to reform in education is big on the vision thing but not on the thinking thing. Second, it takes place over far too little time to allow the careful thinking that is needed. This includes genuine consultation, not poll-taking that gets tabulated and ignored. Third, it relies on slogans, to which educators are terribly susceptible. Fourth, it dismisses or attacks criticism that is at odds with prevailing views. Fifth, it forgets that patience is a virtue and that without it the monkey will not be caught.

Harry Potter and his classmates laughed at Professor Trelawney for her lousy ability to predict the future, but actually she is better at it than educationists who deliver prophecies about the Classrooms of Tomorrow. Mr. H., a history teacher who passed through my school in the mercifully short time of one year, was a good example. He was fond of “teaching” class by showing movies. “In the classroom of the future,” he said, “all history will be taught by video.” Video! Many of his students disparaged his classes, calling them by the name of the local cinema chain, but the movies at the chain were much better than the ones in the class. I know because I subbed for him and had to sit through some of them, feeling like a classmate of Ferris Bueller’s while listening to a lecture about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff.

Mr. H. was also forward-looking enough to cater to students’ desire to have classes that were fun[1] because that is what students in the vanguard require. His favorite such activity was the “class debate,” a kind of mêlée in which the boys shout at each other and the girls silently wonder when they will grow up. As might be expected of a room full of uninstructed and unconstrained sixteen-year-olds, the favored rhetoric was ad hominem and tu quoque argument. If it had had been criticized when made, the students relying on such argument would have learned something, but Mr. H. said the important thing was to get “the balls bouncing” in the classroom. Maybe he was farsightedly thinking of the weekend shouting head programs of the future, but of the millions of students in training, only a few dozen will become shouting heads. Sounds like a long shot to me. Most of them would be better served by instruction in how to marshal arguments and present them persuasively, preferably without PowerPoint.

Mr. H. anticipated the corruption engendered by high-stakes testing when he cheated “in favor of” his students on their I. B. history papers, which should not have received any detailed comments or editing from their teachers. He went over the drafts thoroughly and required rewrites to eliminate the shortcomings he saw.

It was therefore with a flashback to Mr. H. that I read a recent article in The New York Times entitled “In Classroom of Future, Stagnant Scores.” Even though the “Classroom of Future” was thankfully not shown to be a locus of academic malpractice, it had earmarks of the H. approach to study. Something called “engagement,” i.e., fun with bouncing balls, is evidently considered desirable in such classrooms. An astonishing Example of the Future was the boy who was supposed to be doing his sums by shooting at rockets on his computer screen. The problem, which anyone should have been able to anticipate, was that the boy played to shoot rockets, not to get sums. He would shoot at any rocket that looked like a good target, not just the “correct” ones. But that’s all right, said the boy’s teacher, because “[e]ven if he doesn’t get it right, it’s getting him to think quicker.” It may be all right “In Classroom of Future,” but it is not all right at, say, the Hyatt-Regency in Anaheim, where I once watched a young cashier come to grief as a guest of the hotel asked her to make change for $100. She couldn’t do it, but she was adept at using her keyboard and screen to summon help.

This visionary gleam of rockets, failed sums, and bouncing balls persists even though there is little or no evidence (as how could there be?) that the wired classroom produces better learning. Not that that matters to the companies selling the technology. A representative of one of them said, “Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.” I note that of the four desirable abilities learned, three of them can be learned without “Classroom of Future.”

The article also has much to say about the way high-tech classrooms seem to go in tandem with increases in class size; about the way high-tech purchases seem to crowd out other purchases such as soap, Kleenex, and books; and the way their proponents seem to persist in their visions not just, as I see it, against the “educational experience of the human race[2]” but also, as the article points out, in the face of a complete lack of evidence that the gadgets produce better students. Like Mr. H. these frothy futurists seem as lightweight as bouncing balls.

When writing about education is readable, it often throws away some potential readability in breathless enthusiasm, particularly when anticipating the destruction of rule books, great leaps forward, revolutions, new eras, etc. Given that “era” has almost become a synonym for “moment,” that Eden sank to grief, and that the original Great Leap Forward was not, this kind of writing should be suspect. Our suspicion may be aroused because the writing bears a resemblance to ad copy promising a “revolutionary advance in dishwashing” and other kinds of pitchman’s b*******[1]. It may be suspect because it conflicts with what our imagination of the real tells us is “the educational experience of the human race.” It may be suspect because it overlooks the indisputable fact that many people receive a sound education without a single revolution.

It may also be ironic. Hence perhaps an article in BBC News recently about another bold initiative in the New York City Schools, this one called iZone, which the reporter helpfully tells us means “Innovation Zone.” It has promising brand-recognition cachet, but what will it deliver?

The iZone’s Principal hopes to solve “the fundamental problem” of most schools, which, she says, is that they “are not organized around individual students’ needs.” The way she hopes the iZone will solve this problem is by destroying the requirement of “seat time.” In another line that made me instantly suspicious, she said, “We have students who are ready for graduate level work now—and we have students who will not make progress unless they’re in a three to one staff situation. Having them in a class of 30 is not going to get results.”

To understand my suspicion, consider that there is now one and only one system that is “organized around individual students’ needs.” That system is private tutoring. All other systems are organized around a combination of students’ and institutions’ needs—as they must be in any real world. Not to recognize this is either blindness or baloney, and pernicious baloney if the institution’s effectiveness is vitiated by demanding of its teachers what only private tutors can do. How well would Leopold Mozart’s lessons have gone if he had had to give them to 129 students in addition to meeting little Wolfgang’s individual needs? If Frank Russell had not intimately known his brother Bertrand, could he have had the same chance of overcoming Bertie’s aversion to studying Euclid? Could he have had that knowledge while teaching five sections of geometry?

On the other hand, many people have had an excellent education in well-taught classes that required seat time. What babies is iZone throwing out with its bath water? The principal gives away part of the game when she mentions the students who need a “three to one staff situation.”  My guess is that the iZone will end up meeting some, not all, students’ individual needs. It could be argued that young Mozart needed a “one to one staff situation,” but I bet that such students’ needs will not be met as Frank Russell met Bertie’s.

I have discussed elsewhere the problem of fobbing off constructivist nonsense on students for whom it is ill-suited. While I share the principal’s concern that students who need three-on-one support to make progress get what they need, it would be a shame to divert lots of teachers to the needs of the few students with certain needs while shortchanging the many students with others. It would certainly be wrong to divert resources from the education of bright students to make good that need, for bright students have needs of their own. Recognizing this problem is essential if some students are not to lose the schooling they can get from an institution with reasonable aims.

I fear that schemes to place kids in constructivist hangars or depots with work stations connected to banal software will turn out to be the way such schools “meet” some of their “individual students’ needs,” thereby freeing up teachers to mind the ones who need a “three to one staff situation.” We are already seeing some software being touted by its manufacturers as like the Oxford tutorial system. Who knows that someone won’t end up believing it? Fiscal pressures are increasing too, requiring teachers to do more and more with less and less.  This demand could be affecting the need for education-hangars. At what point will teachers finally be expected to do everything with nothing? Some irony!

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I recently listened to a discussion with the 103-year-old Professor Jacques Barzun. Asked by his interlocutor to comment on the “writing process,” Barzun left him momentarily nonplussed by saying at the outset, “All systematic devices for generating good writing are a mistake.” I wish the two had discussed this comment more fully, for it seems to go against much of what was taught in the 1980’s and ‘90’s (and later) about writing.

The length of Professor Barzun’s life has allowed him to hold the record for the longest absence from the New York Times Best Seller List between consecutive best-sellers—some forty years between The House of Intellect and From Dawn to Decadence. His first best-seller, called Teacher in America, still in print after nearly seventy years, may have hit on the alternative to “process writing.” It is very simple: teachers must “work like dogs” at commenting on the writing of their students. In my experience nothing could be truer. I would love to find a shortcut, but I never have. “Peer editing” still seems to me more like writing instruction by homeopathy than genuine writing instruction should be. I mention Barzun and writing because in all but the best talents, and sometimes with them too, “individual students’ needs” shape the coaching given. It would be a shame to see the teaching of writing farmed out to software or otherwise ignored in the rush to meet “individual students’ needs” when some of them turn out to be more equal than others.

“Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”—Henry David Thoreau

One of the gamy mysteries of “branding” is the way that some respected brands will go off, their products and services degraded. For a while inertia and advertising divert people’s attention from the degradation. Two examples occur to me. The first was one of the few remaining good-quality shoemakers in New England, which sold out to an enveloping company that lowered the quality of its shoes and hired cheaply paid foreigners to make them. Another was a company that provided services to automobile-drivers. A relative of mine who worked for them reported attending business meetings at which they planned to downgrade their formerly famous “member services.” My relative, now retired, pointed out that the reason many people kept their membership for thirty or forty years was that the company gave good service reliably. These companies downgraded their products the way an unscrupulous dairy farmer waters his milk before bringing it to market.

It is a chilling thought that a third case might be found in American education. In this case the “brand” is “college preparatory diploma.” A report that was no joke covered the increase in “rigorous” courses offered in high schools at which 40% of the students who took AP classes got failing grades (1 or 2). These schools’ students were in turned “prepared” by middle schools that offered “Jungle Gym Math,” beanbags, and bed sheets in their curricula

What is more, we now have a report that 40% of college students in the US who take them give up on majors in science, technology, engineering, and math because “It’s Too Darn Hard.” The report blames poor teaching at universities for this disaster. That may indeed be a part of the problem, but I guess there’s more to this story.

The reporter perplexingly notes that grades are lower in science majors because “the answers are clear-cut and there are no bonus points for flair.” I am not sure what non-science courses the reporter has in mind by way of contrast, but surely a good teacher in a humanistic discipline also insists on clarity of thought and response? As for “bonus points for flair”: what can this mean? That a student who thinks badly can salvage part of his grade with verbal flimflam? That kind of imposture should be, and is, smoked out by good teachers. Maybe good teachers are rarer than I like to think, but it’s possible that when students find themselves up against firm demands for intellectual work, they crumple because they were not held to account during their college preparation and have not developed the habits of work and intellect that they need.

We all recall the dismal history teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off lecturing about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff as his dazed students drool helplessly on their desks. Is it that bad at university? One way to find out would be to compare the rate at which STEM[1] majors are dropped by undergraduates from the US with that of students from India and China. If the home-grown rates are higher, it may mean that these undergraduates have been ill-served by a secondary education with trout in the milk rather than by universities with drool on the desks. To the argument that Indian and Chinese students put up with lectures because they don’t know any better, I would be tempted to counter that it’s because they don’t know any worse.