In Today's World, Geography is More Important than History

This is the follow-up post I promised to write in my last, a review of Diane Ravitch's Reign of Error.

I like history. I read history books (occasionally) in my free time, and I include the subject in my (mostly English) teaching. But in The New History of the World, which I rely upon as one source for a general overview, author J. M. Roberts argues that the pace of change has increased since the Neolithic era and that that increase continues, and this is something we can feel almost daily, rendering the lessons of history steadily more remote.

Last year two important new education books appeared at almost the same time, Amanda Ripley's the smartest kids in the world and Professor Ravitch's Reign of Error. I wanted to read both, have now completed both, am glad I read both, since they both make valuable points -- but at the time I was unsure of which to read first. I ultimately chose to read Ms. Ripley's book first, largely because my career in international and domestic education has led me to conclude that, in today's world, geography is more important than history -- that is, knowing more about the way the world is today is more important than knowing how one's country was yesterday; and a corollary of this is that being able to see where today's American education stands in relation to that overseas is more important than understanding how it compares today with what it was in the past. Finishing both books has confirmed me in that opinion. Professor Ravitch does not ignore international educational data, but the value of Ms. Ripley's work continues to shine, for example in a new Slate article published today.

I agree with Professor Ravitch's opinion that American K-12 education has gotten worse in recent decades, especially because of the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind. I also agree with those who believe the Common Core standards are better than those state standards that were taught to in the previous decade. But unless American educators know that, for all the ballyhoo accompanying the Common Core, once implemented their students will still be 2-3 years behind their peers in east Asia in mathematics, or understand that pursuing the strategy of Wendy Kopp's followers to prepare all children for college in spite of the enormous financial and opportunity costs involved, which Marc Tucker's commendable blog post in Education Week yesterday, which highlights vocational education in Switzerland, which like Singapore, which has a still better education system, only prepares 20-30% of any cohort for tertiary education but ends up with a better educated, more employable population -- until Americans get out of their limited domestic box and are aware of these real options that are being successfully implemented overseas now, our nation will continue to blunder down fruitless reform paths while other countries leave our young in the dust, an outcome surely no one in America's education debates wants.

Some of the Best Thinking on 21st Century Education

International efforts to define the educational needs of the 21^st century have been proceeding for nearly two decades now. As early as 1996, the UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century, chaired by former European Commission President Jacques Delors, proposed in Learning: The Treasure Within that, building on the four pillars that are the foundations of education – learning to know, learning to do, learning to live together,  and learning to be – all societies should aim to move towards a necessary Utopia in which none of the talents hidden like buried treasure in every person be left untapped. 

The next year, the OECD’s education ministers recombined the knowledge, skills, and values implicit in the Delors pillars into the concept of competencies, and the OECD has done much work to define and select the competencies “for a successful life and a well-functioning society”, and has used them in designing its PISA (Programme in International Student Assessment) assessments. It has concluded that three categories of competencies are key in the 21^st century: acting autonomously, using tools interactively, and interacting in socially heterogeneous groups. 

The APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) economies have developed a 21^st century competency framework encompassing APEC’s priority academic content areas: English and other languages, mathematics, science, information and communication technologies, and technical education. 

Finally, the European Union has legislatively defined eight key competences for lifelong learning: communication in the mother tongue, communication in foreign languages, mathematical competence and competences in science and technology, digital competence, learning to learn, social and civic competences, a sense of initiative and entrepreneurship, and cultural awareness and expression.   

I have synthesized these efforts into a description of One World learners’ competences, which I will publish tomorrow. 

On the Implausibility of Closing Both Achievement Gaps at Once

Alexander Russo recently posted about the imbalance in the online education debates, where the loud and rude are drowning out other voices. Whitney Tilson responded in agreement, and then invited links to his website, promising to "blast out" the posts of "reformers in the trenches". As a reformer who has been ejected from the trenches, I'm not sure that I qualify; but I looked around his website to gain a greater familiarity with his views, and am writing this post largely in response to his invitation.

Mr. Tilson is closely connected to the KIPP school in the South Bronx and to Teach For America, and his online YouTube video and the trailer for his documentary repeat the familiar themes about American schools "failing" children of color while schools like KIPP's achieve, in contrast, nearly miraculous results (although his video, from 2009, uses data that have subsequently been shown to have greatly exaggerated the success rate of KIPP graduates in obtaining four-year degrees), so I take his to be the standard view of education reform in his diagnosis of our problems and his support for proposed solutions. The video shows him to be stunningly inaccurate in his use of his summations of data, but this is not the main point I want to dwell on. Instead, I want to focus on the two gaps that he correctly identifies, and the implausibility of any likely success coming from the strategy of closing our domestic achievement gap as a means to closing our international one.

Mr. Tilson correctly conveys the bad news that black and Hispanic twelfth graders are, on average, only achieving what our white eighth graders achieve on average on our National Assessment of Educational Progress. He also correctly notes our dismal mathematics and disappointing science scores on the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (although he wrongly alleges that our reading scores show the same thing, when they are clearly highest of the three for us and somewhat above the international average). His heart appears more motivated by the prospect of closing our domestic gap, which we have inherited from a racist past and from the differential development of our planet, than by closing the international one; and he may well hope that success in closing the one will help close the other. But in this I think he is badly mistaken; and because he is influential, that mistake is likely to have harmful effects throughout the reform movement.

The reasons he is wrong, as I believe, are principally two: (1) the charter schools he supports typically pursue the low domestic standards that render our entire nation's K-12 system uncompetitive, even if they provide marketing data that supports the institutional goals of charter management organizations and the mainstream of the charter school "movement"; and (2) opportunities for developing higher achievers who could be truly internationally competitive are being lost through school district neglect. The Common Core standards that many of us had been hoping would lead us out of this inferior status will not do so, at least in math or in any of the other non-English subjects, and not in English either unless we ditch our truncated, inauthentic, cheapskate approach to assessing writing.

And while my trustees and I have developed a charter for a school that really could compete, we have been unable to get it authorized by traditional districts that fear losing any more students, and so our brightest young prospects too often face a choice: shell out for America's independent school sector, which is very competitive on an international basis, or be ignored in otherwise ballyhooed public school districts that are steadily being revealed as being both overrated and unprepared to change.

A Confucian Take on BBA in Newark

I have just read with interest Professor Pedro Noguera's "A broader and bolder approach uses education to break the cycle of poverty". Having spent seven years teaching in South Korea, and following that with teaching for seven years at Locke High School in Watts (seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine?), and having read Dr. Noguera's Unfinished Business, I comment from an unusual but informed perspective.

The BBA ("broader and bolder approach") may be the dream plan for the well-intentioned holders of cultural, financial, and social capital who are its main backers, for it fits their own ideals and uses the money this class holds to employ the expensive services this class offers, but it is unlikely to succeed as a national model, even if it succeeds locally, because it is a maximally expensive approach with little street credibility that may yet achieve little or nothing in terms of academic outcomes for its students. Of course, I would be happy to be wrong about this pessimistic forecast, but given the track record of previous attempts along these lines, I remain doubtful.

By contrast, Confucian polities like South Korea (statistically poorer than Africa 50 years ago), Shanghai (emerging from the dark persecution of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s), and Japan (recovering from utter devastation after World War II), being unable to access the generosities of BBA, were forced to look inward to develop their own resources, starting in the family home, and attack collectively the problems of urban regeneration. It is impossible to do this successfully with a closed attitude towards the outside world--the examples of North Korean juche ("self-determination"), Marcus Garvey in Haiti, and Locke High School in Watts prove the disadvantages of depending solely upon locally developed resources in building successful cultures ready to compete in the 21st century, and this realization affected my decision to reach outward, towards Green Dot Public Schools, to turn around Locke High School (although we intended a partnership, not a takeover). But charismatic efforts like that going on in Newark, even if successful, are unlikely to be sufficiently replicable to make much difference in helping the United States to better prepare its youth for the global competition they are increasingly exposed to; instead, we need better informed, and in particular internationally informed, models to adhere to.