Education Proposals: Final Thoughts

I’m trying to remember what got me into this foray into presidential politics last July.

It’s the age of Trump. Many people I greatly admire or enjoy reading, from Jonah Goldberg to Charles Krauthammer to Charles Murray, are dismayed by Trump. Not I. What delights me about him–and make no mistake, I’m ecstatic–has nothing do to with his views on education policy, where I’m certain he will eventually offend. I cherish his willingness to say the unspeakable, to delight in unsettling the elites. I thought Megyn Kelly was badass for telling her colleagues not to protect her. I also think she’s tough enough to deal with an insult or three from The Donald, and I imagine she agrees. What’s essential is that the ensuing outrage wasn’t even a blip on the Trump juggernaut.

Why, given Trump’s popularity, haven’t other Republican candidates jumped on the restrictionist bandwagon? Why did John Kasich, who I quite like, go the other way and support amnesty?

To me, and many others, the reason is not that the views aren’t popular, but because some vague, nebulous top tier won’t have it that way. The rabble are to be ignored.

This isn’t bravery. Politicians aren’t standing on their principles, looking the people in the eye firmly, willing to lose an election based on their desire to do right. Ideas with regular purchase out in the real world are simply unmentionable and consequently can’t become voting issues. Americans on both sides, left and right, feel that they have no voice in the process. I could go on at length as to why, but I always sound like a conspiracy nut when I do. The media, big business, a vanilla elite that emerged from the same social class regardless of their political leanings…whatever.

And along comes Trump, who decides it’d be fun to run for President and stick everyone’s nose in the unsayable.

I understand that conservatives who oppose Trump are more than a bit miffed that suddenly they’re the ones on the wrong side of the Political Correctness spectrum, given their routine excoriation by the media and the left for unacceptable views. Better political minds than mine will undoubtedly analyze the Republican/conservative schism in the months and years to come.

I don’t know how long it will last or what he will do. I just hope it goes on for longer, and that Trump keeps violating the unwritten laws that dominate our discourse. The longer he stays that course, the harder it will be to instill the old norms. That’s my prayer, anyway.

Anyway. Back in July, someone complained that education never mattered in presidential politics and expressed the hope that maybe Common Core or choice would get a mention. Maybe a candidate might express support for the Vergara decision!

Every election cycle we go through this charade, yet everyone should know why education policy doesn’t matter at the presidential level. No presidential candidate has ever taken on the actual issues the public cares about, but rather genuflects at the altar of educational shibboleths while the Right People nod approvingly, and moves on.

So I decided to demonstrate how completely out of touch the political discourse is with the Reality Primer, a book the public knows well, by identifying five education policy issues that would not only garner considerable popular support, but are well within the purview of the federal government. (They would cut education spending and reduce the teaching population, too, if that matters.)

I support all five proposals in the main, particularly the first two. But my agenda here is not to persuade everyone as to their worthiness, but rather illustrate how weak educational discourse is in this country. All proposals are debatable. Negotiable. We could find middle ground. The problem is, no one can talk about them because the proposals are all unspeakable.

No doubt, the Donald will eventually come around to attacking teachers or come up with an education policy that irritates me. I’m braced for that eventuality. It won’t change my opinion. Would he be a good president? I don’t know. We’ve had bad presidents before. Very recently. Like, say, now.

But if he’s looking for some popular notions and wants to continue his run, he might give these a try. Here they are again:

1. Ban College-Level Remediation
2. Stop Kneecapping High Schools
3. Repeal IDEA
4. Make K-12 Education Citizen Only
5. End ELL Mandates

In the meantime, at least let the series serve as an answer to education policy wonks and reporters who wonder why no one gives a damn about education in politics.

As for me, I got this done just an hour before the Starbucks closed. I will go back to writing about education proper, I promise.

Education: No Iron Triangle

I came from the corporate world, which invented the project management triangle. (“Fast, Good, Cheap: Pick Two.”)

Education has no triangle.

Money, of course, doesn’t work. Just ask Kansas City. Or Roland Fryer, who learned that kids would read more books for money but couldn’t seem to produce higher test scores for cash. Increased teacher salaries, merit pay, reduced class size are all suggestions that either don’t have any impact or have a limited impact….sometimes. Maybe. But not in any linear, scalable pattern.

“Good”? Don’t make me laugh. We don’t have a consensus on what it means. Most education reformers use the word “quality” exclusively to mean higher test scores. Teachers do not. Nor do parents, as Rahm Emanuel, Cami Anderson, Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee have learned. Common Core supporters have had similar moments of revelation.

So until we agree on what “good” is, what a “high quality education” means, we can’t even pretend that quality is a vertex of education’s triangle, even if it existed. We could save a whole lot of wasted dollars if people could just grasp that fact.

Time is an odd one. We never use the word directly, but clearly, politicians, many parents, and education reformers of all stripes believe we can educate “faster”. Until sixty years ago, calculus was an upper level college course. Once the high school movement began, fewer than 3% of students nationwide took trigonometry, between 10-20% took geometry, and the high point for algebra was 57%–over one hundred years ago–then declining to 25%. (Cite.) One of the little noted achievements of the New Math movement was to alter the math curriculum and make high school calculus a possibility. At first, just kids with interest and ability took that path. Then someone noticed that success in algebra I predicted college readiness and everyone got all cargo cult about it. By the turn of the century, if not earlier, more of our kids were taking advanced math in high school than at any point in our history.

And that was before kids started taking algebra in seventh grade. Sophomores take now take honors pre-calculus so they can get a second year of AP calculus in before graduation. Common Core has gone further and pushed algebra 2 down into algebra I.

Yet 17 year old NAEP scores have been basically stagnant for the same amount of time our high school students have been first encouraged, then required, to take three or more years of advanced math.

Not only do we try to educate kids faster, we measure their gain or loss by time. Poor kids of uneducated parents lose two months learning over the summer. CREDO, source of all those charter studies, refers to additional days of learning. Everyone comparing our results to Singapore always mentions the calendar, how much earlier their kids start working with advanced math. These same people also point out that Singapore has a longer school year. Longer school years don’t appear to work reliably either.

Except maybe KIPP, whose success is mostly likely due to extended school hours. KIPP focuses on middle school and has not really been scrutinized at the high school level. Scrutiny would reveal that the program doesn’t turn out stellar candidates, and while more KIPP alumni complete college than the average low income black or Hispanic student, the numbers are reasonable but not extraordinary when compared against motivated students in the same category who attended traditional schools. Particularly given the additional support and instruction hours the KIPP kids get.

So KIPP’s “success” actually adds weight to the NAEP scores as evidence that time–like money and quality–doesn’t respond to the project management constraints.

Kids learn what they have the capacity to learn. Spending more instruction hours will–well, may–help kids learn more of what they are capable of learning in fewer school years. But the NAEP scores and all sorts of other evidence says that learning more early doesn’t lead to increased capacity later. And so, we’ve moved 1979 first grader readiness rules to preschool with considerable success, but that success hasn’t given us any traction in increasing college readiness at the other end of childhood. Quite the contrary.

I probably don’t have much of a point. I was actually thinking about the increasing graduation rates. It’ll be a while until part 2. I’m swamped at work, moving again, writing some longer pieces, and really would like to post some math curriculum rather than detangle my mullings.

But the triangle thing is important. Really.

Take note: under 1000 words. Hey, I have to do it every year or so.