Why Education in History is So Important

What students learn matters.

For some people, they ought to learn certain ideas: that the United States is "exceptional," that its leaders are generally motivated by a desire to liberate the world, that its economic system of free enterprise promotes innovation and freedom, and the like. These people, many of whom protested a revision of the College Board Advanced Placement Exam in US History, understand that students' experiences in school help frame their view of the world, and they want kids to share their particular view.

To an extent, that's not only right, it's unavoidable. I want my students to believe that dictatorship causes suffering (most of the time), that freedom of expression is as productive as it is morally preferable (most of the time), that the rule of law is essential to political effectiveness.

The reaction to the AP curriculum therefore was not totally unreasonable, but it was badly skewed. There is nothing wrong, for example, with promoting the idea that Americans in the south were proud of slavery. They were. They defended the institution with the very last of their blood and treasure, and there was very limited dissent from this view of things. These facts are unfortunate and maybe even embarrassing, but they are true, and people need to understand them if they are to know US history. (They also probably need to know those facts to understand the defense of the Confederate flag and the Black Lives Matter movement.)

That the College Board could revise the test in the face of political pressure reveals the bureaucratic nature of that organization, but it also highlights the urgency of teaching kids to think for themselves, and to ask questions about the facts.

I would rather that they learn to ask: was the United States really exceptional? How? Was it exceptional in the way many leaders said it was? Is that good? Has the United States, by and large, promoted freedom in the world? How? Why? Is our economic system truly based on the market? Do we want it to be? Why?

Questions are much better than answers.

Effective Students and Standardized Testing

In an earlier post, I noted the obvious: that the ultimate goal in all teaching (and therefore in all educational policy) is to produce effective students -- people who can do the things we want them to be able to do. The problem for teachers and policy makers, though, lies in identifying these abilities and then assessing whether students have them. Neither step is especially easy, but the Common Core Standards attempt to achieve both.

According to the developers of these standards, "the Common Core State Standards establish clear, consistent guidelines for what every student should know and be able to do in math and English language arts from kindergarten through 12th grade." In theory, at least, the program "focuses on developing critical-thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills." In other words, the developers have determined that they prefer to cultivate certain skills rather than emphasizing the retention of certain prescribed content. They have identified the abilities they believe kids should have.

In the abstract, I endorse these choices. In my own work, I spend much more time thinking about how to teach kids to do things than about how to get them to remember things. And, really who can object to the idea of improving "critical thinking and problem solving?"

Perhaps the most underestimated or misunderstood truth in education, however, is the extreme difficulty of assessing such things, even if we can nail down what, exactly, the phrases mean. Critical thinking happens only internally, in the brain of the thinker. In order to know whether someone is doing it, then, we have to design ways for her to reveal what is going on her mind. In other words, she needs to communicate with us. As a result, the means of communication we choose are at least as important as the skills we identify. Not only that, but we have to help the student communicate in our preferred medium so that we can see what she is thinking.

No one thinks that the ultimate goal -- effectiveness -- is the same as taking a paper and pencil test.Very few adults take tests as a part of their daily lives; few employers care how well their employees do it, no one does it for fun, and it is not an element of good parenting. The question, then, is why we want anyone to take a test as a way of assessing her effectiveness.

The answer is that we need some proxy for "effectiveness." We need to find the elements of adult effectiveness (critical thinking, for example) and then measure whether people have those elements. Tests might be able to do that.

Also, maybe not.

Effective Students = Effective Schools

If we are to achieve Thomas Jefferson's dream of an informed, independent polity, we need effective schools. Children need to acquire certain skills in order to function politically and economically in our society, and so adults need to hep them acquire such skills. Some people would like to think that home schooling is the best way to attain that goal, but they are being unrealistic at very least, and may even be wrong in their basic conclusions. If "society" needs young people to be educated, then "society" must do the educating, and that means we need schools.


One serious problem with this conclusion, however, is that bad schools are at least as harmful as no school at all. They may be physically dangerous, they may teach kids that life sucks because it is boring or arbitrary, and they may train people in destructive habits. As a result, we cannot just say we want schools; we want schools that teach effectively.
So, what makes an effective school?

The best answer -- and I do not mean this facetiously or cynically -- is that effective students make effective schools. In one sense, this statement is not very helpful. Students with the talent, discipline, and family support necessary to succeed don't need a lot of help from professional teachers. (Let's call this the First Premise of School Evaluation.) These kids will find a way to do well even despite bad teaching. If everybody in the school has to tools when he arrives, then the school looks, and maybe even is, a good school. Admission offices at selective private schools, like the one I work in, understand this fact, and seek applicants who will make the institution and the community stronger.

The less obvious sense of the statement is more important. Our goal is not to have effective schools, but to have effective students. The only reasonable measure of a school, therefore, is whether its graduates can so what they need to do when they leave. (This will be the Second Premise.) If a school's alumni, by and large, live happy and productive lives, then the school has met its ultimate purpose.

Of course, if we go back to the First Premise, though, we can't know whether the alumni's happiness and productivity came as a result of or despite the actions of the school. To evaluate the schools themselves. therefore, we need to find a way to measure the difference between the kid when he arrived and when he left.

This is a difficult thing to achieve, and will be the subject of a number of later posts.

Why Grade Inflation is Bad Teaching

To teach is to help someone do something he could not do before. By definition, then, the student comes in unable to perform well at the tasks being taught. In order to help him improve, the teacher needs to give him frequent, accurate feedback on where he stands relative to the goal.

That's why grade inflation is such terrible teaching. If I, as a teacher, tell my student that she is doing very well at a task when she is not, in fact, doing very well at the task I may make her feel better in the short term, I may ingratiate myself to her, and I may reduce conflict between her (and her family) and me, but I have failed in my essential function as a professional.

Once again, college admission offices can help secondary school teachers in this regard by choosing mot to reward students with GPA's of 120 on a 100-point scale over those with lower averages. They can make clear that rigor is more important than scores.

No matter what colleges do, though -- and colleges will never act with the interests of high school student at the top of their priorities -- secondary teachers need to buck up and hold their students to the highest standards possible.

I went into teaching, in part, with this objective in mind. I went to a public high school in a fairly wealthy Connecticut town. My graduating class was a bit larger than Millbrook School as a whole – so, we’re talking a middle sized public school.

All the classes there were “tracked;” Level One was considered honors, Level Two was college bound, Level Three was remedial.  For two years, I skated. I did as little work as possible, considered my teachers to be foolish or incompetent or both (and in retrospect I think I was right a lot of the time) and thought much more about how I fit in than what I should be doing myself. When I was a junior, though, I started to take myself a little more seriously, and invested more of my energy in school work. I did well, especially in history and English, and most of my classmates were pretty serious students.

In fact, most of the people who graduated in the top 20 in our class went to the most competitive colleges, many of them Ivies. I remember my US History class, in particular, being very demanding and very engaging. The kids were more talented than I was, and I had to work hard to keep up.

But in my senior year, in addition to the full-year European history class, I requested to take other history courses – what were called electives. These were all Level Two courses, and Level One students usually did not go into them, but I asked to do it, and got in to two or three.  When I arrived, I was shocked. These courses were holding bins, waiting rooms for kids ready to go home. I could do next to no work and get the highest possible grades. Kids literally could sit around throwing spit balls. The homework consisted of copying definitions into a notebook and turning the notebook in. Tests were even easier than that, and there was no writing at all.

I went into teaching because I never wanted that to happen to anyone if I could help it. It made me angry, and still does. People should never be ignored or condescended to, and the failure to challenge a student is both neglectful and condescending. My mistakes as a teacher, then, tend to go the other way, and that’s why. 

Should We Abolish Public Schools?

Calls to rely on private schooling fail to recognize the fundamental purpose of offering free, government-funded education.

Ron Paul

As concerns about the quality of the American system of public education have grown, some have advocated abolishing it completely. The arguments for this proposal come from a number of angles, but they are all seriously misguided.

One approach is articulated by Libertarian Ron Paul. who sees the government involvement in education as the worst kind of meddling in the private lives of citizens. Only in schools, he seems to think, are kids exposed to drugs and pressures to conform. Schools, as they exist now, he thinks, only stunt our children's ability to think for themselves and forge an identity of their own.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it idealizes the alternatives. Does Paul imagine that all 1.1 million students in New York City public schools can be educated by their parents or the friends of their parents? And if they are, won't they be exposed to an even narrower point of view than in public schools? Does he figure that conformity comes only from the public sector?

Another is the "pure capitalist" or free market approach. By funding public schools, this line goes, we remove them from the pressures of the market, which would force them to meet the needs (or at least the desires) of parents. For-profit ventures -- or at least private ones -- would allow people to make freer choices, in the same way that markets allow more choice than centralized economies.

To an extent, this idea has some merit. It is the foundation of the independent school world's argument that state regulators should leave them alone. For example, the New York State Association of Independent Schools, to which my employer belongs, accredits its member institutions based on standards derived from the goals of the schools' own missions. In other words, the school is expected to announce what it intends, sell that product to families willing to pay between $25,000 and $50,000 a year, and then show how it delivers the product it sells. It mostly relies on the market to decide whether the product itself is worthy.

But the families in independent schools have leverage most people do not have. The very fact that they can pay such outrageously high tuition indicates the degree of social and economic leverage they already have. Not all families have that kind of negotiating power, and if they did they would not have the knowledge or experience necessary to apply it.

Not only that, but schooling provides a social good to people other than those directly involved in its purchase. The childless people in a school district, and those whose children have already passed through the schools, and whose children go to independent schools all benefit from a generally well-educated population. Employees who cannot read or reason or less effective; voters who cannot sort through the BS of a candidate's campaign may harm us all. Like roads, sewers, bridges, and other infrastructure, schools represent a societal investment in the functioning of the group. Free markets don't take such good into account.

Jefferson's vision for America included an informed, engaged electorate, and he assumed that such a thing required a certain level of education. He himself was a remarkable autodidact, who read voraciously and did more than dabble in everything from moral philosophy to botany. Jefferson certainly did not imagine that everyone would reach his levels of expertise in most things -- he was not an especially humble man -- but it seems that he did assume that anyone taught to read and count would then use those tools to expand their abilities more broadly. What he wanted, in the end, was a certain level of individual autonomy.

The question is how we can achieve that kind of autonomy for the greatest number of people.

"School Choice" and Public Subsidies

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson urged Americans to "educate and inform the whole mass of the people" because "they are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty." The idea, not unique to him, is that popular governance depends on a literate voting public, conversant in the issues of the day and capable of making reasonable decisions in its own self-interest, whether that interest be collective or individual.

How exactly to get that done, however, has never been obvious. I doubt, for example, that Jefferson, who was a staunch defender of state power, would have supported federally mandated or federally funded schools. He did found the University of Virginia, a public institution, and he also supported the idea of very basic publicly-funded education for everyone. After three years of free schooling, though, Jefferson would have required students' families to pay for the rest.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo proposed earlier this month that the state provide tax breaks to help families fund private education. According to one source, "in New York City, 242,000 students attended nonpublic schools, 19 percent of the student population." Of those, many go to "elite," very expensive schools, like Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, Dalton in Manhattan, or Horace Mann in the Bronx. For most people, these school are far too expensive to contemplate, and it does not seem that Cuomo's proposal would provide enough money to pay all of the $30,000 tuitions involved.

The question is, then, whether Cuomo's idea would help further the project urged by Jefferson so long ago.  His motivation, he said, stemmed from the fact that “there are some areas, frankly, where the public schools are not places where you would want to send your children ... Sending your child to one of these failing public schools is in many ways condemning your child to get a second-class education.”   In that case, he figures, the state should support parents' efforts to get their kids out of bad schools and into better ones.

On its face, however, I don't see how this would help. Would more people find private schools available to them as a result of this tax break, or would the same wealthy, well-connected families simply double their benefits by saving the money required to insulate their children from the very masses Jefferson was most concerned about?

The teachers' unions are pretty sure it's the latter:  “We respect parents’ decisions to send their children to private or religious schools, but they shouldn’t ask taxpayers to subsidize those personal choices,” Mr. Korn said. “What’s next, tax credits for parents who want to golf at country clubs instead of municipal courses?”











http://ny.chalkbeat.org/2013/07/10/weiner-would-give-private-schools-equal-standing-at-city-doe/#.VV8hSShiF7N

Hazing is Not Coaching

George Najjar got a place in the New Jersey Football Coaches Hall of Fame last summer. He's won a lot of football games for at least two different public high schools. He is a terrible coach.

Sayreville defensive coordinator George Garcia is a loser, who somehow thought that supplying steroids to children was a good idea.

How can I say that, without ever having met him or seen one of his teams play? Because anyone whose teams are capable of sexually assaulting their members is a terrible coach. Hazing and bullying is not coaching. It's just violence. And if this guy's players thought it was OK to commit such violence against the younger, weaker kids in the program, then Najjar failed miserably at his job.

Najjar is a disgrace, and the fact that even one of his players' parents can stand up for him reflects a sad misunderstanding of what it means to teach or coach. Just as with the Horace Mann sexual abuse scandal, this event was precipitated in part by a bizarre belief among some weak-minded, immoral adults that bullying their kids was a coaching style.

It's not a method or a style, it's a failing. Let's get that straight.

Muslims Did Perpetrate the Attacks of September 11, 2001 -- and it's OK to say so

Islam does not cause terrorism. It did not cause the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.

The people who perpetrated those attacks did claim, however, to be doing it in the name -- and for the cause -- of their warped, misinformed view of Islam. Osama bin Laden and the leaders of al Qaeda who planned the attacks declared war on the United States because it threatened their vision of what the world ought to be like: a constricted, misogynistic, brutal theocracy.

Most Muslims do not, and never did, support the policies and actions of the terrorist group. They do not recognize as their own the message that bin Laden espoused.

When we say that Muslims attacked Manhattan, and they did so out of misplaced religious zeal, we are not condemning all Muslims and we certainly are not condemning Islam. We are telling the story as it happened.

That's why the objections to a short (approximately seven-minute) video at the September 11 Museum in Manhattan are badly misplaced. People worry that visitors to the museum will mistakenly believe that all Muslims are to blame if Islam is mentioned at all. If that's true, then we have problems (and I am sure we do), but they are not ones that can be solved by excluding the information.

I suppose that the purpose of "interfaith panels" like the one lodging the complaint is to reflect sensitivities like these. But I do not understand  -- and find a bit distasteful -- the position that we should not mention the stated motives of the people who staged the attacks. It seems fundamentally dishonest, and therefore not what museums should do.

Best High School Reform? Change College Admissions

Not long ago, Andrew Delbanco, from Columbia University, visited our school to talk about his book, College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be. His argument is that American colleges have lost sight of their most important goal, which he sees as teaching young people to think for themselves and understand the world in its broadest moral and personal senses.

I agree with his priorities, and appreciated his talk, but his book seemed more like a faculty room rant than a systematic treatment of the subject.

And while it may be flip, I have an answer that does not require a book to explain. If you want to fix American secondary and university education, abolish early admission programs. Early admission robs students of one quarter of their high school careers. The perceived need to get high grades in September makes them risk-averse, they spend the first few weeks worrying (or feeling they ought to worry) about applying, and then the feel they ought to be "done" as soon as they are admitted. It takes a lot of energy, attention and sympathy to talk them out of these warped -- but understandable attitudes.

It steams me to hear college professors talk about what high school graduates can't do when they arrive as freshmen because it is the professors' employees who contribute most to that failure.

ESPN and the Power of "The Media"

The New York Times has published a series of stories recently about the powerful influence of ESPN on college athletics and college life. Essentially, their premise is that the money offered (and earned) by ESPN to universities leads college officials to do things according to a business model focused on marketing sports television rather than by an educational model focused on student-athletes. I can't see how the argument can be refuted.

from http://sportsmediajournal.com/2007/10/02/the-goods-on-espn-part-1-the-criticisms/

But there is also the way ESPN treats individual subjects, like Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel. First, ESPN led the way in hyping "Johnny Football" is his freshman season, boosting him to the Heisman Trophy. Then, it reported that in the off-season, Manziel had, among other things, taken money for signing autographs in violation of NCAA rules. Then, when the NCAA found that there was no evidence that Manziel had taken money, ESPN analysts debated endlessly over whether justice had been done. They also complained about how much of the spotlight he was hogging -- a spotlight shined almost exclusively by ESPN.

In other words, ESPN made the story and then complained about the story. No journalist individually may have violated any ethical principals, but the monolith of the "worldwide leader" acted irresponsibly.

What Rutgers and Horace Mann Have in Common

There's no need for another voice condemning Rutgers men's basketball coach Mike Rice; he's been fired as a result of an enormous public outcry over his "coaching methods." In light of the recent revelations about long-standing sexual abuse at Horace Mann and other schools, however, it is time to start talking about how to hold teachers accountable for important stuff.

First and foremost, the best way is decidedly not to link teachers' evaluations to arbitrary statistical performance. Test scores do not make a teacher, and won-lost records do not make a coach. Both of these measures are arbitrary because they do not take into account "distance traveled" by the students in the charge of teachers and coaches. A good coach brings his players from one level of play to another; as players improve, they ought to win more games than before, but only if the schedule and other factors allow it. Won-lost records can measure the talent of players, and some test scores can measure the talent of students, but they are not good ways of assessing educators.

On the other hand, eccentricity and bizarreness are not teaching methods. Being self-involved and weird is neither necessary nor sufficient for good teaching. I don't buy the Dead Poets' Society model of excellence, in which the teacher inspires kids to "be themselves" by himself being entirely different from anyone else. High-quality instruction also requires patience, discipline, and hard work. Individuality, free-thinking, innovation, and a certain amount of quirkiness often do reflect and allow excellent teaching. Teachers have to dig new ground and push students beyond their comfort.

But both Horace Mann and Rutgers confused extremity with originality. Kicking kids is not quirky, it's violent, undisciplined and ineffective. Rutgers should have recognized that fact immediately. Athletic Director Tim Pernetti, also fired in the wake of the scandal, should not have entertained for a moment the idea that Rice was just "intense." Convincing kids that they only have value except insofar as they worship the teacher is not avant-garde, it's abusive and selfish. Horace Mann administrators chose to interpret clearly bent behavior as a "method," when it really was pathology. In both cases, the supervisors in question were lazy and unprofessional.

As a private school teacher myself, this stuff angers me personally. The number of comments I have seen recently suggesting that sexual abuse is rampant at prep schools, that only someone with similar pathologies would be interested in working at one, and that all students in such places are snot-nosed are not only unfair, but harmful. The comments come from the ignorant, but they are the responsibility of the bad teachers who created the impression.

The Disgrace of Horace Mann and Robert Berman

Ever since the New York Times Magazine published a story last June revealing the long pattern of sexual abuse allowed at Horace Mann over the course of thirty years, the school has had to contend with the problem of how to deal with the past crimes of its faculty. It's not an easy question to resolve, since many of the alleged perpetrators are dead, and the statute of limitations -- in the strict legal sense -- has expired. Amos Kamil, the writer of the Magazine piece, was an alum of the school, and the fact that he himself has a stake in the outcome is complicated and interesting.

My reaction to Marc Fisher's new piece in The New Yorker on the Horace Mann scandal was different. His primary subject was a particular teacher, Robert Berman, who taught English at Horace Mann for many years. As a father and a person, I am saddened and disgusted by the stories about Jerry Sandusky and the abuse by Catholic priests. But Fisher's description of Berman provokes something even more visceral.


image from http://horacemannsurvivor.org/

I teach at a private school, and have done so for more than 20 years. I am personally invested and interested in my students. I keep in touch with some of them for many years after they graduate. As a result, I feel smeared by Berman, besmirched by association. Here's what I mean: Megan McArdle, of The Daily Beast wonders aloud why we have not more generally questioned the existence or structure of private schools as an institution, given these accusations. Her hypothesis is that too many journalists and other people of privilege went to these schools, and therefore are reluctant to expose the problem. In other words, my school is probably just as bad as Horace Mann, but the issue is being covered up.

That Horace Mann administrators fell for the intellectual facade is sad in itself. That they allowed him to use it in the furtherance of a crime is beyond disgrace. They do not represent us as a profession; they are not representative as a cross-section.

To teach is to empower. Berman prowled for the weak and vulnerable, found them at their lowest ebb, and then exploited them. He belittled them, according to Fisher, and exalted himself.That he could abuse his power in that particular way is worthy not only of anger, but of contempt. If Fisher's story is even half right, Berman is a despicable human being, the lowest of the low.

Not only that, but he appears from Fisher's account to be a loser. The beatnik affectation of suits and sunglasses, the writing of lists (the refuge of intellectual dwarfs), and the tedious, pedantic writing he did, using big words in an attempt to mask small ideas, indicate a wannabe seeking approval.

Evaluating Teachers

Teaching in a public school has sometimes been a perilous proposition. In the worst cases, teachers have been subject termination for the content of their instruction, and we might imagine what could happen to a person teaching about evolution in an evangelical district. Only slightly less egregious would be the practice of firing more experienced teachers because new ones are cheaper.

The traditional response to these problems, avidly defended by teachers' unions, has been to offer tenure to teachers with a certain number of years on the job. To an extent, that solution works, in that it de-politicizes the act of teaching and provides some idependence, if not autonomy, for teachers to do their jobs.

Of course, the system also allows incompetent or lazy people to keep their jobs without the concern experienced in almost every other profession about adequate performance. I myself had some terrible teachers, at least one of whom was sleeping with his students, because tenure made it so difficult to move people on. As someone who works at an independent school, I am therefore grateful for the fact that tenure does not apply; we have been able to get people out when we need to do so.

Fairly assessing the actual performance of teachers is not so easy, though. Unlike most other professions, teaching can only be evaluated secondarily; that is, we judge the effectiveness of teachers through the actions of someone else -- the students. Teachers can say with justification that test scores don't accurately measure what they are doing because it is the kids, not the instructor, who must do the job, in the end. Start with students with less talent, with fewer resources, with trouble at home, with inadequate nutrition and you will end with lower scores.

That's why efforts to include classroom visits and other tools in evaluations makes so much sense. Intimidating as these approaches can be, teachers must face accountability for what they actually do. As Education Secretary Arne Duncan noted, “When everyone is treated the same, I can’t think of a more demeaning way of treating people... Far, far too few teachers receive honest feedback on what they’re doing.”

It's time for teachers to see themselves as professionals rather than tradesmen. Standards matter, and we need to help craft and enforce those standards.