The Ambler

The late Nelson Mandela used to employ an idiom common among black South Africans to describe muddle-headed people: they “cannot think properly.” The notice of muddle-headedness is not always so gentle. Before I became a teacher, my previous line of work took me at one point to a large construction project run by a highly intelligent and ferocious Project Manager whose staff meetings caused white knuckles even among veteran construction managers. I was sometimes invited to these staff meetings, though I usually and fortunately stayed below his radar. If a manager made a claim that the project manager found suspect, the PM would turn his big guns on it till it and the manager making it were a grease-stain on the carpet. He would end such search-and-destroy missions with the question, “Why don’t you think, goddammit?”[1]

The common thread is the sense that “thinking properly” is a requirement of adult life, and that people who can’t do it are held to account, sometimes painfully. How to get people to learn to do so or to work through the consequences of failure is therefore a vital issue. It is also an urgent issue if, as claimed by two American researchers, students emerging from many US universities cannot think well enough to establish themselves in adulthood. I intend to examine this research in a future posting.

For now I want to examine the possibility that many Americans do not think properly when they think about teaching and learning. I am calling this species of intellect “crapthink,” and from time to time I intend to discuss some signs of its presence in the discourse of education.

Exhibit A takes us to the commencement ceremony of a high school I used to teach at. Graduates with honors were entitled to wear an “honors stole” with their other academic regalia. At one point after the ceremony, a parent borrowed the honors stole of an honors graduate, draped it over his daughter’s shoulders, and had her pose for pictures in it. The principal asked her to remove the stole because she had not graduated with honors. The parent said, in his most Augustan manner, “That is so chickenshit!” and directed his daughter to continue posing with the stole.

This is crapthink in action, and it is pernicious. What lesson is Daddy’s Precious learning from her father’s imposture? How is it different in kind from making an untrue claim on a résumé? How is it different in effect from allowing her to pose with an A in a university course for which she did a couple of hours of indifferent study a week? How is it going to prepare her for success in a world that has standards and deadlines and is populated by intelligent and exigent people?

Banesh Hoffmann, a colleague of Einstein’s in Princeton, wrote a book in 1962 called The Tyranny of Testing.  In it, he offered a detailed and wide-ranging critique of multiple-choice testing as a basis of determining “intelligence” and “scholastic aptitude.” He couldn’t have known that such tests would also eventually be used to determine “teacher effectiveness,” though he would surely have been astonished, if not outraged.

Anyone who has read Maria Ruiz-Primo’s study of the usefulness of different kinds of test to capture data on the “opportunity to learn” (OTL) knows that big standardized tests are the worst kind to use. That is doubtlessly due to limitations in how they reveal what students actually know;  but their weaknesses can be pinpointed, as Dr. Hoffmann notes. Here are the weaknesses:

•  They deny the creative person a significant opportunity to demonstrate his creativity, and favor the shrewd and facile candidate over the one who has something of his own to say.

•  They penalize the candidate who perceives subtle points unnoticed by less able people, including the test-makers.

•  They are apt to to be superficial and intellectually dishonest, with questions made artificially difficult by means of ambiguity because genuinely searching questions do not fit into the multiple-choice format.

•  They take account only of the choice of answer and not of the quality of thought that led to the answer.

•  They neglect skill in disciplined expression.

•  They have a pernicious effect on education and the recognition of merit.

A new point may now be added, as the SAT plans to do away with its penalty for wrong answers (which raises a problem I have dealt with):

•  They reward successful guessing as well as thinking.

There is also a statistical problem with the tests. Hoffmann points out that the SAT’s ability to determine “scholastic aptitude” turned out to be about as statistically valid as determining a group of people’s heights by taking their weights. If what we needed to know is that heavy people tend to be taller than light people, we could have achieved the confidence through measurement that a moment’s critical thinking gives us; but that is not what we need to know. We need to know just how apt or learned or intelligent individual people are. That is more troubling.

The problem with the SAT is, of course, that even its promoters now admit it does not accurately measure aptitude, and for some years have let it be known as just “the SAT.” Those letters stand for the nothing the test actually measures,  but they have been kept because of their value in branding. One is tempted to say that some value is better than none, but in this case it is actually worse than none. In a parallel argument, Hoffmann shows that IQ tests do not measure intelligence (something we also know by reading Stephen Jay Gould). Instead, they measure a phantom “quantity” that Hoffmann, tongue in cheek, calls iquination—the ability to do well on IQ tests. What should we call the parallel phantom ability to do well on the SAT? I would propose satiation except that it already has a legitimate meaning and does not need an illegitimate one.

A third part of Hoffmann’s argument against the multiple-choice test is that the weaknesses of its questions show that “it is not designed to test deeply what it is designed to test superficially.” Test-makers also use ambiguity as a proxy quality for difficulty. There are many examples of weak questions; I choose at random one of Hoffmann’s examples of an authentic SAT question, in which the underlined part must either be left unchanged or “corrected”:

Cod-liver oil is very good for children. It gives  them    vitamins they might otherwise not get. (1) NO CHANGE (2) , it (3) , for it (4) ; for it

Hoffmann notes that this question was rated as “easy” by the College Board, but anyone with an ear for the rhythms of English, including the English professors he consulted, would say that it is impossible to choose between (1) and (3) without having a context for the sentence(s). A facile test-taker, on the other hand, will quickly figure out that it must be either (3) or (4) and that (4) would break Strunk & White’s Rules, which leaves (3). Some aptitude, I mean satiation!

The Metrics Claque now hooting up “objective” “measurement” of teachers’ “effectiveness” proposes to expand the use of such tests to rate how good individual teachers are. Remember:  First, what they measure in teacher “effectiveness” is a phantom entity. Second, they are not very effective at measuring it. Third, their questions penalize subtlety and discernment, and reward guessing and second-guessing. The Metrics Claque should long since have been shown the door. Instead, it seems poised to bring a new phantom into the gray pantheon. Let us call it teviation (for Teacher Effectiveness Valuation) and its proponents Teviants.

In general, school started off well, but there has been one snag. In one of the courses I teach, the introductory reading I chose has proven too difficult for many of my students. I know this because I have already spent some time having pointed discussions about the reading, because they have already had some time to work in groups to share their understanding, and because they have had seat time to read, pencil in hand. Reading pencil in hand yielded in some students no more than question marks. In the group work I could see that some of the students were asking their classmates to explain it, while others paid cursory attention or none at all to their reading or to what was being said about it. The whole class’s discussion showed that there were more questions than answers and as much silence as questions.

Yet another reaction was clarified for me by a student who asked me during group work, “What should we do if we can’t find anything about this piece on the internet?” I told him that I had chosen the piece partly because I didn’t expect them to be able to, but then suggested some methods for approaching the reading by asking questions of it.  By contrast, a lot of students, when something is difficult, turn to a pre-digested version, which they then describe as what the author “really said” or “was trying to say.” I hate that formula in discussing poetry, and I hate it in discussing prose; but I can’t blame students for falling back on it. The culture of pre-digestion leads them inevitably to conclude that a reading with depth, weight, or thickness is unreal because unreadable, while the digest is real because they can get it. It teaches them that the correct response to difficulty is to give up and try something less troublesome.

But the troublesomeness of this particular reading remains. Next week, I will make some adjustments in how they approach it, giving the excellent readers a chance to test themselves and the more tentative ones a way to approach its insights more fruitfully.

A teacher connected with his class has the ability to size it up on the wing and to make any adjustments needed. It is part of what Barzun calls the teacher’s “perpetual discretion.” To speak of it thus is to generalize, but the connection a good teacher makes with his class plays out in particulars, such as the Reading Drama I have just told you about.

It also has to be said that being a good student includes the readiness and ability to meet good teaching partway, the way Adèle meets Jane Eyre. My students have clearly been trying to do so. Ideally, in another week or two we will come away from this challenge with an understanding that allows us to proceed.

We could say, among other ways of putting it, that I have connected with my students and they have connected with me. The connection is personal, for I dealt with students individually and in small groups to help them gain the understanding they lacked. The connection is professional because it is governed by the demands, constraints, and opportunities in the teacher – student relationship. The connection is also, let it be said, instrumental, for it is a means to an end: that the students learn what is to be taught.

As against this kind of connection—personal, professional, instrumental and reciprocal—we are now presented with another kind of connection brought to us by “science” and “technology”. The advertisement-cum-article in which this connection was expounded tells us that the sense of connectedness is revealed by students’ scaled answers to comments such as “I feel comfortable going to my teacher for help” and “My teacher really cares about me”. The questionnaires are compiled and the compilation of responses is performed by a suitably paid “education” company.

Problems immediately reveal themselves to an adult possessing “critical reading skills”, or what used to be called an educated general reader.

(1)    The “education” company assumes that students’ answers are the valid result of sound evaluation and ripe judgment. Raise your hand if that jibes with your experience of sixteen-year-olds. I do not mean to disparage unduly the not-completely-formed powers of judgment evident in our not-entirely-adult students, but rather to suggest that judgments of this kind must be treated with caution. That does not happen when they are combined as equally valid in a composite result naïvely and uncritically presented as a “scientific” “measurement”.

(2)    The survey misuses averages and endangers standards. Ms. Campbell, the teacher in the report, is not judged to be good or bad but “below average” in “connectedness.” Let us suppose that Ms. Campbell and her colleagues all improved their “connectedness” by equal leaps and bounds—or, more correctly, let us assume that students start rating them as “more connected.” Rather than receive congratulations for this improvement, Ms Campbell would still be judged “below average.” If things went the other way and she and her colleagues suffered some kind of mass demoralization or drop in their students’  regard, such that their scores all dropped, Ms. Campbell would still be “below average” rather than, say, abysmal. Of course, that could also happen if the students rated them low because of pique. In all these shifting sands, where are standards?

What is more, if “average” is a point on the scales in questions given to the students, the survey has failed to understand something elementary: “average” is not a judgment, it is a statistic. If students rate all their teachers “above average,” we are faced with the troubling conclusion that average is above average or that above average is average. In this kind of system, what can “average” mean? I hope no one from the “education” company tells me that average does not mean average!

But there is more. Teachers like Ms. Campbell receive these data because the “education” company that generates them and the school administrators who pay its fees believe that the onus of improving the ambience of education rests entirely on the teacher. They also appear to believe that handing out results from a questionnaire is a valid substitute for sound pedagogy and effective educational leadership.

At one point in the article we are assured by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that “when combined with test scores and observations, student surveys made for a more consistent and reliable way of measuring how teachers were performing.” That conclusion has been confounded by a thorough debunking of the study that produced it. We also hear a Harvard professor assure us that we can’t stop using numbers and “go back to nothing.” Who said anything about nothing? We could “go back” to discernment, discretion, educational leadership, and the mutual regard of students and teachers.

Many teachers know what the general public does not know: that at some schools the kind of abusive, assaultive and violent language used by internet trolls is faced by those teachers daily in real time in their real lives. Of course, they get the online treatment too, but I was put graphically in mind of the live problem by reading an article passed to me from an Australian magazine. Language and insults I had never even heard in my teens are now part of ordinary daily student-teacher “discourse” at school. And the assault is often accompanied by battery. Comments that should be actionable at law are routinely made by students—and by their parents! And the offenders are not shown the door after this kind of abuse.

A friend reports the same kind of problem in many U.S. schools.  A professional acquaintance, the principal of an urban school in the U.S., reports being assaulted, having her car keyed, and having to deal with “hundreds of fights a year.” The principal is regularly savaged verbally by parents, though they have not yet beaten her up. This is a middle school.

The principal also reports that she wants to fire teachers who don’t do their job, but I would like to know what a teacher’s job is in a place where he or she is called a “fucking pedophile” or a “cocksucker” or a “motherfucker” with impunity by his or her students. These are live trolls, not “virtual,” and they are in your face. (By the way: the student who called his teacher a “cocksucker” was the son of a couple of highly placed diplomatic personnel. The apple seems to have fallen far from the tree.)

According to one study, the job of a teacher in such conditions is to survive without a collapse in health, usually by becoming radically detached from work; for it turns out that teachers, according to this study, are dead last among “callings” in quality of their working environment and in relations with their “supervisors.” Of course it is possible that teachers in such circumstances are “ineffective,” but it is time to consider the possibility that the entire ecology of some schools and districts is poisonous to education, and that this failure may be the fault of more than, or other than, the teachers.

The old saw is that a teacher must be an educator, a therapist, a social worker, a confessor, a counselor, an arbitrator, and a peacemaker.  Now, someone is suggesting that social work at schools should be done by an actual social worker. The problem with this revelation of good sense is that with the budgets most school districts have, there won’t be enough money for more than a token program—like bringing Off! to a locust plague.

But there may be more. These postings have argued again and again that one of the requisites of effective education is that the school should be a functional community, or part of one. In a dysfunctional community, or in the absence of a community, what a social worker does may simply not be enough. Nor will branded simulacra of community be enough.

Talk of trolls, actual or virtual, suggests a viciousness that community values work against: you don’t call someone you respect or care for a “cocksucker.” In a true community, as my political philosophy professor used to say, you don’t beat your mother for beer money. You don’t slug, knife, libel, slander or curse your teacher, or you children’s teacher.

But the plague I am talking about is not a Biblical one of locusts or frogs or blood. It is a social one, or perhaps political. It is found in places with ineffective or absent political and social institutions. Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature locates it in places that lack institutions and rational principles of life that are effective against violence. In its worst form, it was called by Thomas Hobbes “the war of all against all.” It is the (un)natural habitat of the troll.

Shortly after my last posting I read an article in The New York Times: “Education Secretary Allows Reprieve on Test-Based Teacher Ratings.” The last time I checked, a reprieve was the postponement of an execution or sentence. That implies, of course, a crime. The truth is that a VAMmed teacher would not even have it as good as a criminal. A conviction of crime must result from evidence of and testimony to criminal behavior, but VAMs are statistical phantoms, and only tenuously connected to behavior of any kind. What is more, a criminal has the benefit of due process of law, but a teacher would suffer termination with no judgment at all.

The reporter says the “reprieve” resulted from recognition of the “enormous pressure” teachers are under. The prospect of arbitrary ruin does tend to have that effect, but I suspect there is more behind the “reprieve” than sudden compassion. Once the VAM meat-grinder is turned on and the expected hecatombs ensue, no sensible person will touch a VAM-linked teaching job. Imagine what that will do for the faculty room and the classroom!

Of course it is possible that the rottenness of these “metrics” is finally becoming apparent to the people at the Department of Education and the Gates Foundation, but don’t hold your breath waiting for them to call things by their proper names. (See my last posting.) A whole other ethos governs much of those institutions’ discourse on “education.”

One contemporary Chinese philosopher says that Western philosophy searches for The Truth but Chinese philosophy searches for The Way. That is a nice four-word distinction, and Americans whose only acquaintance with Confucius is through “Confucius say” jokes would find a lot to ponder by looking through the Analects. For example, the story goes[1] that a royal emissary asked Confucius what was the first thing a ruler must do. His reply: “What is necessary is to make sure that everything is called by its proper name[2].” He then went on to expound a chain of causation arising from the failure to do so, whose final dire but perhaps hyperbolic effect is that “the people do not know how to move hand or foot.”

Incapacitation by bad language is of course one of the main things Orwell warned against in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He argued further[3] that bad language makes bad politics—or was it the other way around? His interest in the problem of rotten language was that of his “ordinary persona,” who is plain-thinking, plain-spoken, and practical.

Another take on the problem of rotten language is more strictly philosophical. I refer to Harry Frankfurt’s[4] wonderful little book On Bullshit. Its thesis is that unlike the “pure” liar, who cares enough for the truth to go against it deliberately, the BSer is indifferent to truth, particularly if it makes him look bad, rocks his boat, or loses him money. Instead, the BSer simply says what will protect him, advance him, or promote things in which he has a stake, regardless of their truth or falsity. Frankfurt advances a careful argument culminating[5] in the claim that “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

The British came up with a nice term for someone who achieves three of some feat: a “hat trick.” Well,  Arne Duncan and his RAce to the Top (RAT) have outdone themselves and scored a baloney hat trick. In it, things are not called by their proper names, bad politics gives rise to bad language (and the other way around), and the old barnyard epithet becomes a precise description.

The bulk of today’s posting is written by a former student, now 18, who returned after his first year at university to conduct a colloquium in philosophy-reading over the summer holiday for a group of students in grades 10, 11 and 12. He addresses the students in a concluding email. I am taking it exactly as written, omitting introductory and concluding paragraphs aimed at this summer’s particular situation. The rest has a wider application partly for its own sake, but partly because it runs so refreshingly counter to much of what passes for justification of study and learning. There is nothing here about national security audits or “value added,” though it is valuable and should make anyone who reads it feel a bit more secure in his or her humanity. (My title for this posting comes from the title of one of Isaiah Berlin’s essay collections, and so it seems doubly apposite, given the writer’s admiration for Berlin.)

…I thought I should write a few words to wrap things up, as an attempt to look back at the past few weeks and make something of it. Looking back, I guess the most important question to ask is: why read philosophy? Let me try to explain what I have discovered from my own experience, and how I think this should influence the way we approach philosophical literature.

First (as Christopher was telling me yesterday), philosophy helps us to understand people. Some parts of philosophy are explicitly about people, and help us to reflect upon the way we treat ourselves and others. ‘He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.’ ‘Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it.’ Despite all the criticism Mill receives for endorsing a moral theory that does not prioritize intrinsic human worth (unlike Kantian ethics), I think his book On Liberty is, ironically, a classic tribute to human dignity.

Reading philosophy is also a way to get to know some truly exceptional individuals, the authors. In On Liberty and Utilitarianism, I see a torn person, trying his best to stay faithful to the legacy of his dead father (James Mill), yet irresistibly drawn to a far more complex and, in my opinion, more wonderful philosophy of the ends of life. While reading The Social Contract, I marvel at how Rousseau, a person with such a remarkable vision of the ideal state, could have been so unsuccessful at preventing his own personal life from falling into ruins.

But not only does philosophy describe human beings in general, and certain individuals in particular, it also invites us to behold the entire history of humankind. In ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Isaiah Berlin plays the role of the narrator, as he tells how Kantian philosophy descended into Stalinist horrors. ‘What can have led to so strange a reversal—the transformation of Kant’s severe individualism into something close to a pure totalitarian doctrine on the part of thinkers some of whom claimed to be his disciples?’ he laments. I can almost hear J. R. R. Tolkien continuing: ‘If it has passed from the high and the beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred…’[1]

Of course, philosophy is not just about people, it is also about ideas. Ideas can be misleading, but it is equally easy to be lost in a vacuum of ideas. The latter seems to be the problem for many of us today: what ideas are we passionate about? Maybe you want to continue Rousseau’s quest for the ideal state, or maybe you seek a more practical vision for Hong Kong in particular. Perhaps, like young Marx, you want to change the way we view and relate to our work. Or maybe, like Isaiah Berlin, you think moral problems cannot be solved using technological solutions, so instead of changing institutions, you want to change people’s hearts. (Or maybe you just aren’t interested in ideas. If so, I doubt you would have come to these seminars, but in good pluralistic spirit, I think it’s perfectly fine.)…

Finally, philosophy teaches us how to think, and how to be a good philosopher. Above all, a philosopher must be humble. Hume writes that ‘ a man is guilty of unpardonable arrogance who concludes, because an argument has escaped his own investigation, that therefore it does not really exist.’ In light of what Hume goes on to show, I think philosophers should be prepared to admit not only the limits of their investigations, but in also the limits of rational investigation per se: some truths are simply impossible to demonstrate by logical argument.

What does all this mean for the way we read philosophy?

Read the original texts, and take your time. A philosophical classic is like a novel: you must appreciate it, muse over it, and relate to it. And I challenge you to engage personally with the ideas in the books and to decide what you think about them, whether your conclusion is that you agree, disagree, agree in part, or are simply uninterested. Do not be too quick to criticize, and always remember that many theories may not be fully correct, but may still contain part of the truth. Most importantly, remember that philosophy is the love of wisdom; you will miss something very important if you read with your head, but not with your heart.

Two weeks ago I wrote about some of the difficulties of learning to teach well. I ended with what I hoped would not be an afterthought: that students must also learn to become teachable. After all, as Barzun says, “Each individual must cure his or her own ignorance.” Earlier this week I had an email from my former colleague who taught a future Senior Wrangler of Cambridge[1], reflecting on the teaching and learning of math.

We agree that appetites for learning tend to be discovered, awakened, and fed rather than instilled, though of course there are exceptions. But we also agree that there are forms of “appetite suppression” that one can learn or become acculturated to. Maybe an analogy is in order.

One of history’s greatest prodigies of eating and drinking must have been King Louis XIV. The Duke of St.-Simon and Nancy Mitford both reported his astounding appetite. His typical dinner, says Mitford, was “composed of four plates of different soups, a whole pheasant and a whole partridge or chicken or duck…stuffed with truffles, a huge quantity of salad, some mutton, two good slices of ham, a dish of pastry, raw fruit, compotes and preserves[2].” He was healthy enough even with his appetite to have reigned for seventy-two years, but his wife said that if she had eaten half as much as he, she would have been dead in a week. Clearly he did not need encouragement to eat a lot. Two contrasts suggest themselves: the person who naturally “eats like a bird,” and the kind of socialite Tom Wolfe calls a “social X-ray,” made skeletal by constant dieting in order to exemplify the Duchess of Windsor’s saying that “you can never be too rich or too thin.” In between lies the person with a typical appetite.

The analogous students are the budding Wranglers, who are ravenous and cannot get enough to study, the students who have little taste for x or y, and the typical student who can manage to finish his homework and sometimes even to ask for seconds. But the student analogous to the “social X-ray” is the one who is certain that having a life means indulging in a kind of intellectual anorexia.

My friend reports that a colleague of his had accepted the rightness of having discussion groups in math class, much like the knots of Exeter students around the Harkness table. A lot of good it did him! As soon as the desks were rearranged for working foursomes, the students would begin conversing about their extracurricular lives, gossip, etc., some of them even taking out snacks to eat as if at a café (“all carrots and salads and nutrition bars…”). “He did everything you are supposed to do, and most of the kids couldn’t care less, and it was an honors course.” Something is terribly wrong here: at the same school where a future Wrangler was studying, whole table-loads of students had for all practical purposes rejected the imperative to take trouble to learn seriously, even when they might have been able to.

It won’t do any good to harp on what the teacher does in the kitchen for a classroom of anorectics.

Today’s text is a line by Arne Duncan:  “I am a deep believer in the power of data to drive our decisions. Data gives us the roadmap to reform. It tells us where we are, where we need to go, and who is most at risk.” The line has a certain resonance, though not quite the pithy eloquence of Lady Bracknell’s that “statistics…are laid down for our guidance.” Lady Bracknell has the advantage of Duncan in that her ventriloquist was Oscar Wilde, but both dummies have made a fundamental mistake. Statistics do not guide us, and they do not tell us where we need to go. They are results or epiphenomena, like the tracks of subatomic particles in a bubble chamber. Saying that they tell us where we need to go is like saying that the bubble chamber tells the particles where they need to go. Statistics may provide useful information, but deciding where to go is a judgment, not a statistic. Confusing these things can lead to mistakes, and it can provide cover for an abdication of responsibility: it’s not me, it’s the numbers.

Thus, I am troubled by Duncan’s analogy of reform by statistics to finding a destination on a roadmap. It implies that reform is a kind of AAA TripTik^®: just follow the nice map. Actually, as I have argued, a better analogy is Chesterton’s, that it is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. Indeed, I would argue that it is a comparative of which we have not settled the comparative.

What else can explain the utter failure of No Child Left Behind and the incipient failure of its offspring RAce to the Top? If data were the roadmap to reform, by this summer 100% of US high school graduates would be proficient in all their subjects, as “proven” by their ability to get good scores on multiple choice tests in two of those subjects. Some superlative: an unachievable goal. Some comparative: a method of “measuring” achievement that is absurd, as shown by, among other cases, the Tennessean music teachers rated by the ability of their students to answer multiple choice questions about English prose composition.

But even the data themselves are suspect. Mr. Duncan says they can tell who is “at risk,” but the “value”-“added” “metrics” used to determine peer-groups of schools whose students are most “at risk” assign like weightings to factors whose coefficients of correlation are very, very unlike; and they make consequential determinations on the basis of correlations as weak as -0.114.

What is more, a naïve believer in Duncan’s assertion would have no clue of what the statistics of “proficiency” leave out, for they are all based on multiple-choice tests. The problem is that these tests do not capture a lot of what takes place, or should take place, in a good classroom[1].

As Donald Campbell foresaw, the prospect of high-stakes testing tends to exert a corrupting pressure on courses away from breadth of learning and towards test preparation in the narrowest sense. In the article from which Duncan’s comment was taken, its author, Professor Meredith Broussard, focuses on the narrowness of the preparation, which often turns out to be the study of textbooks written by the publishers of the tests. To no one’s surprise, the mysteries of multiple choice Professor Broussard cites as “solved” by study of the expensive textbooks amount to what Orwell called “preparation for a confidence trick.” Like Amy Chuan, Broussard wants success for her child and looks for it without stepping outside an intellectual terrain in which these tests and their deleterious effects are taken for granted. She further notes that success in these tests usually comes from studying expensive textbooks and taking expensive courses of test preparation, options that are generally not open to the students “most at risk.”

I do not mean to imply that Broussard and Chuan are confidence tricksters; rather, Broussard at least seems to have been taken in by the confidence game established by the real confidence men, people like Duncan. (It is possible that instead of being a confidence man, Duncan simply can’t think properly.) In my view, if he bears any resemblance to a compass, it is because we can tell directions from him by noting that he is the southern end of a northbound horse.

 

I have mentioned my friend H, diagnosed in childhood as a borderline “moron,” who went on to a distinguished education and a career as a doctor. But H had another surprise up his sleeve. As a college freshman I discussed learning math, telling him that I was not terribly successful at it. He flatly promised that if he tutored me, I would improve. He then described his way of approaching math instruction.

I remember enough of his description to be able to recognize something like it in a system of math teaching now commonly used to great effect in Japan, whose PISA math results are among the world’s best. By contrast, U.S. math teaching tends to be rather less successful.

Attention is now focused on the incipient failure of American teachers to be able to use the kind of math instruction called for in the Common Core, which includes an attempt to imitate Japanese success. The irony is that Japan’s successful method of math instruction was pioneered by—Americans. Not that it matters: American teachers, according to The New York Times, are not learning how to teach effectively.

Unlike many pieces that locate the problem in teachers, this Times piece notes that the whole structure of teacher education in the U.S. is radically defective, and bound to leave teachers badly equipped to do their job. Though the defectiveness starts in schools of education, it continues during a teacher’s professional life. While Japanese and Finnish teachers spend only 600 hours a year in the classroom, using other time to plan and improve their teaching and to observe their colleagues, American teachers spend 1100 hours in the classroom but have very little pointed and helpful peer review. I was fortunate enough to be a part of an exception to this rule, but none of my professional acquaintances in American schools report having had anything like this experience.

Instead, the usual pattern is to call in a silky consultant with shining incisors to give a brief workshop on the “new methodology.” It ends up unpersuasive, and the teachers don’t actually get practice in what they are “taught.” Instead, they participate in Rube Goldberg workshop “activities” where they clap and smile a lot and learn to give answers that mimic understanding. And then it’s over, the pedagogical equivalent of anonymous sex.

And what about those three older guys slouching in the back, their arms folded across their chests? Their look says, “I dare you to teach me something.” It’s tempting to blame them for their lack of receptivity, but for how many years have they been going to these charades for one or two days per year and learning nothing they could use? The Times article mentions “active resistance” rather than passive aggression, but both these responses imply a teacher training that was incomplete and unpersuasive. Unfortunately, when there is a kind of follow-up, it is the wrong kind. After the first wave of glossy consultants comes the second wave of gimlet-eyed commissars to enforce adherence to questionable methods badly taught. It inculcates bitterness, not compliance.

The Times article notes the importance of patience, which is regrettably not usually an attribute of education administrators in the U.S. It will also be important to stress the need for thoroughness. And no plan can work if the teachers being told to implement it do not have the time they need to think about how to make it work, or to consult with their colleagues.

Finally—and this was not a part of the Times discussion at all—American students who have not yet done so will have to learn, as Adèle did from Jane Eyre, how to become obedient and teachable.