Category: Leadership

By Yuval Noah Harari – 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

Change is the only constant

Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the twenty-second century. What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the twenty-second century? What kind of skills will he or she need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them, and navigate the maze of life?

Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in 2050 – not to mention 2100 – we don’t know the answer to these questions. Of course, humans could never predict the future with accuracy. But today it is more difficult than ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal.

A thousand years ago, in 1018, there were many things people didn’t know about the future, but they were nevertheless convinced that the basic features of human society were not going to change. If you lived in China in 1018, you knew that by 1050 the Song Empire might collapse, the Khitans might invade from the north, and plagues might kill millions. However, it was clear to you that even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and weavers, rulers would still rely on humans to staff their armies and bureaucracies, men would still dominate women, life expectancy would still be about forty, and the human body would be exactly the same. Hence in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk, and wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy, or fight on horseback – and taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious these skills would still be needed in 1050.

In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution thanks to bioengineering and direct brain–computer interfaces. Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.

At present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspapers or public libraries.1 Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts. The Spanish Empire heavily censored all texts printed locally and allowed only a dribble of vetted publications to be imported from outside.2 Much the same was true if you lived in some provincial town in Russia, India, Turkey or China. When modern schools came along, teaching every child to read and write and imparting the basic facts of geography, history and biology, they represented an immense improvement.

In contrast, in the twenty-first century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies. If you live in some provincial Mexican town and you have a smartphone, you can spend many lifetimes just reading Wikipedia, watching TED talks, and taking free online courses. No government can hope to conceal all the information it doesn’t like. On the other hand, it is alarmingly easy to inundate the public with conflicting reports and red herrings. People all over the world are but a click away from the latest accounts of the bombardment of Aleppo or of melting ice caps in the Arctic, but there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe. Besides, countless other things are just a click away, making it difficult to focus, and when politics or science look too complicated it is tempting to switch to some funny cat videos, celebrity gossip, or porn.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

In truth, this has been the ideal of Western liberal education for centuries, but up till now even many Western schools have been rather slack in fulfilling it. Teachers allowed themselves to focus on shoving data while encouraging pupils ‘to think for themselves’. Due to their fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools had a particular horror of grand narratives. They assumed that as long as we give students lots of data and a modicum of freedom, the students will create their own picture of the world, and even if this generation fails to synthesize all the data into a coherent and meaningful story of the world, there will be plenty of time to construct a good synthesis in the future. We have now run out of time. The decisions we will take in the next few decades will shape the future of life itself, and we can take these decisions based only on our present world view. If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.

The heat is on

Besides information, most schools also focus too much on providing pupils with a set of predetermined skills such as solving differential equations, writing computer code in C++, identifying chemicals in a test tube, or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app enables you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even though you only know how to say ‘Ni hao.’

So, what should we be teaching?

Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.3 More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

For as the pace of change increases, not just the economy, but the very meaning of ‘being human’ is likely to mutate. Already in 1848, the Communist Manifesto declared that ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Marx and Engels, however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures. By 2048, physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a cloud of data bits.

In 1848 millions of people were losing their jobs on village farms, and were going to the big cities to work in factories. But upon reaching the big city, they were unlikely to change their gender or to add a sixth sense. And if they found a job in some textile factory, they could expect to remain in that profession for the rest of their working lives.

By 2048, people might have to cope with migrations to cyberspace, with fluid gender identities, and with new sensory experiences generated by computer implants. If they find both work and meaning in designing up-to-the-minute fashions for a 3-D virtual reality game, within a decade not just this particular profession, but all jobs demanding this level of artistic creation might be taken over by AI. So, at twenty-five you introduce yourself on a dating site as ‘a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop’. At thirty-five you say you are ‘a gender-non-specific person undergoing age-adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the New Cosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before’. At forty-five both dating and self-definitions are so passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for you. As for drawing meaning from the art of fashion design, you are so irrevocably outclassed by the algorithms, that looking at your crowning achievements from the previous decade fills you with embarrassment rather than pride. And at forty-five you still have many decades of radical change ahead of you.

Please don’t take this scenario literally. Nobody can really predict the specific changes we will witness. Any particular scenario is likely to be far from the truth. If somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it doesn’t sound like science fiction – it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics, but change itself is the only certainty.

Such profound change may well transform the basic structure of life, making discontinuity its most salient feature. From time immemorial life was divided into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. In the first part of life you accumulated information, developed skills, constructed a world view, and built a stable identity. Even if at fifteen you spent most of your day working in the family’s rice field (rather than in a formal school), the most important thing you were doing was learning: how to cultivate rice, how to conduct negotiations with the greedy rice merchants from the big city, and how to resolve conflicts over land and water with the other villagers. In the second part of life you relied on your accumulated skills to navigate the world, earn a living, and contribute to society. Of course, even at fifty you continued to learn new things about rice, about merchants, and about conflicts, but these were just small tweaks to well-honed abilities.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, accelerating change plus longer lifespans will make this traditional model obsolete. Life will come apart at the seams, and there will be less and less continuity between different periods of life. ‘Who am I?’ will be a more urgent and complicated question than ever before.4

This is likely to involve immense levels of stress. For change is almost always stressful, and after a certain age most people just don’t like to change. When you are fifteen, your entire life is change. Your body is growing, your mind is developing, your relationships are deepening. Everything is in flux, and everything is new. You are busy inventing yourself. Most teenagers find it frightening, but at the same time, it is also exciting. New vistas are opening before you, and you have an entire world to conquer. By the time you are fifty, you don’t want change, and most people have given up on conquering the world. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. You much prefer stability. You have invested so much in your skills, your career, your identity and your world view that you don’t want to start all over again. The harder you’ve worked on building something, the more difficult it is to let go of it and make room for something new. You might still cherish new experiences and minor adjustments, but most people in their fifties aren’t ready to overhaul the deep structures of their identity and personality.

There are neurological reasons for this. Though the adult brain is more flexible and volatile than was once thought, it is still less malleable than the teenage brain. Reconnecting neurons and rewiring synapses are damned hard work.5 But in the twenty-first century, you can hardly afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant – not just economically, but above all socially – you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.

As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms, and the need to change your profession every decade. What is the right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyze it all? How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature?

To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best and feel at home with the unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system.

The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour some grown-up walks in and starts talking. They are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far, we haven’t created a viable alternative. Certainly not a saleable alternative that can be implemented in rural Mexico rather than just in upmarket California suburbs.

Hacking humans

So, the best advice I could give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly. But the twenty-first century is going to be different. Due to the growing pace of change you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.

So, on what can you rely instead?  Perhaps on technology? That’s an even riskier gamble. Technology can help you a lot, but if technology gains too much power over your life, you might become a hostage to its agenda. Thousands of years ago humans invented agriculture, but this technology enriched just a tiny elite, while enslaving the majority of humans. Most people found themselves working from sunrise till sunset plucking weeds, carrying water-buckets and harvesting corn under a blazing sun. It can happen to you too.

Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life. Especially as technology gets better at understanding humans, you might increasingly find yourself serving it, instead of it serving you.

 Have you seen those zombies who roam the streets with their faces glued to their smartphones? Do you think they control the technology, or does the technology control them?

Should you rely on yourself, then? That sounds great on Sesame Street or in an old-fashioned Disney film, but in real life it doesn’t work so well. Even Disney is coming to realize it. Just like Riley Andersen, most people hardly know themselves, and when they try to ‘listen to themselves’ they easily become prey to external manipulations. The voice we hear inside our heads was never trustworthy, because it always reflected state propaganda, ideological brainwashing and commercial advertisement, not to mention biochemical bugs.

As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to manipulate people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more dangerous than ever to just follow your heart. When Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu or the government knows how to pull the strings of your heart and press the buttons of your brain, could you still tell the difference between yourself and their marketing experts?

To succeed in such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better. To know what you are, and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years philosophers and prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the twenty-first century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account – they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that’s hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.

The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go, what you buy, who you meet. Soon they will monitor all your steps, all your breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and machine learning to get to know you better and better. And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate you, and you won’t be able to do much about it. You will live in the matrix, or in The Truman Show. In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to them.

Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. You don’t need to do anything about it. The algorithms will take care of everything. If, however, you want to retain some control of your personal existence and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

Education

1 Wayne A. Wiegand and Donald G. Davis (eds.), Encyclopedia of Library History

(New York, London: Garland Publishing, 1994), 432–3.

2 Verity Smith (ed.), Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (London,

New York: Routledge, 2013), 142, 180.

3 Cathy N. Davidson, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to

Prepare Students for a World in Flux (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Bernie Trilling,

21st Century Skills: Learning for Life in Our Times (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,

2009); Charles Kivunja, ‘Teaching Students to Learn and to Work Well with 21st

Century Skills: Unpacking the Career and Life Skills Domain of the New Learning

Paradigm’, International Journal of Higher Education 4:1 (2015). For the website of

P21, see: ‘P21 Partnership for 21st Century Learning’, http://www.p21.org/our-work/

4cs-research-series, accessed 12 January 2018. For an example for the

implementation of new pedagogical methods, see, for example, the US National

Education Association’s publication: ‘Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global

Society’, NEA, http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/A-Guide-to-Four-Cs.pdf, accessed

21 January 2018.

4 Maddalaine Ansell, ‘Jobs for Life Are a Thing of the Past. Bring On Lifelong

Learning’, Guardian, 31 May 2016.

5 Erik B. Bloss et al., ‘Evidence for Reduced Experience-Dependent Dendritic Spine

Plasticity in the Aging Prefrontal Cortex’, Journal of Neuroscience 31:21 (2011):

7831–9; Miriam Matamales et al., ‘Aging-Related Dysfunction of Striatal Cholinergic

Interneurons Produces Conflict in Action Selection’, Neuron 90:2 (2016), 362–72;

Mo Costandi, ‘Does your brain produce new cells? A skeptical view of human adult

neurogenesis’, Guardian, 23 February 2012; Gianluigi Mongillo, Simon Rumpel and

Yonatan Loewenstein, ‘Intrinsic volatility of synaptic connections – a challenge to the

synaptic trace theory of memory’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 46 (2017), 7–13.

“You’ll never have the kind of schools you would like to have, nor the test scores you want, unless you do something about ______.”

 By David Berliner, Professor Emeritus, Arizona State University

Dr. Berliner’s notes from a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Horace Mann League, on Friday, February 15, 2019.

Thank you all for coming today. I was asked to provide about a presentations on things I think about, that might also be of interest,…. maybe even useful to you all! Feel free to ask questions any time.

I am well aware that you folks do all the hard work, while I have the luxury of being at a university, away from the actual hard work of educating our youth. But before her retirement my wife was a public-school teacher and principal,… my sister-in-law was also a school teacher and principal,…. both my son and his wife are in higher education, … and my daughter is an educational researcher. All these close family relations insure that I do not become another pointy headed academic!

The title of what I have put together for your consideration is “You’ll never have the kind of schools you would like to have nor the test scores you want unless you do something about ___X___.” I’ll relate this to testing issues, as advertised, but as I prepared I strayed a bit from the advertised topic because test scores are related to so many factors other than the effects of teachers and administrators.

First, I want to argue that the state and district environment—its care and nurturance of its citizens and educators—matters a lot. These factors dramatically affect standardized test scores and many of the achievement outcomes that we value. Let’s run a little thought experiment to illustrate this. I am going to ask you which of two states is likely to do better on the reading and mathematics NAEP tests—our nations report card. I will present data to you about these two states, state A and state B. 

OK, any predictions about the states’ score on NAEP? Anyone picking state B?

         I assume that no one here is surprised.  

Anyone here know which states these actually are?

So, my thinking is this:

You’ll never have the kind of schools and test scores you would like to have unless you do something about making your state a better place to live in,… to work in… and in which to raise children. If you just hunker down to address school issues you may be failing many of the children you care about and for whom you are responsible. In today’s America you need to fight as hard for taxes to support healthy communities, families, and schools, as you do for the paper needed by the copy machine, and for professional development days. The non-political, or a-political school administrator, must become a remnant of the past.

Really–I am not a crazy liberal activist! What I am simply stating should be obvious: A lot more time must be spent in political discourse—above and beyond your school board. This seems to me to be a necessary job requirement in contemporary times. The recent trend in which a lot of teachers ran for office, and were elected, makes it clear that I am not alone to suggest what needs to be done.

I also have data to back up what I suggest. I know, and you should too, that the richness of the environment in which we raise our children improves not just their achievement, but their IQ! Let me share one such set of data

Why did IQ—which is usually pretty stable, and rarely changes so much in a population over a mere decade—actually rise 10 points—a point a year!?

Solicit Answers. Discuss

ANS: Electricity/newspapers/strangers who were engineers/ state capitol and federal linkages with local communities/ different and more cognitively demanding kinds of jobs for adults/ etc.

My Point is this: wealthier,.. healthier,…and less parochial environments promote cognitive growth.

You need to think about all the ways your community could provide a richer environment for its kids so that their IQs and their achievement test scores can be whatever their genetic makeup promotes them to be, …You don’t want your students’ test scores to be restricted by family and neighborhood circumstances!

Does that happen? You bet it does. A number of convincing studies suggests that genes do not express nearly as much in “poor” childhood environments– environments with food insecurity, inadequate parenting, evenings spent in TV watching or computer gaming, unsuitable neighborhoods, etc. On the other hand, “rich” environments allow the full expression of one’s genetics… whether it be corn yields or the talents of our youth. It’s not that poor and rich kids necessarily have different IQs, it’s that among rich kids their genetic IQ is more likely to be expressed, whatever it is, while for poor kids, in less than ideal environments, genetic IQ is less likely to be made manifest. Your district’s standardized test scores will reflect that restriction in the expression of intelligence in many of your students’.

This suggests to me that every school administrator needs to understand that housing in their community is an educational issue not just a social issue. Housing patterns—the social environments in which our youth are raised –strongly influence the test scores your schools will display. So,…. I think that in many districts “You’ll never have the kind of schools and the kinds of test scores you might want unless you do something about your community’s housing patterns.”

It’s no secret: our children are tracked into different neighborhoods on the basis of their family’s income, ethnicity, and race. This is where many of our school problems begin. We seem deliberately blind to the fact that housing policies that promote that kind of segregation are educational policies, as well.

When we allow overwhelmingly wealthy, middle-class, and poor neighborhoods to develop, we destroy the chance for the local neighborhood school to help better all our children by bringing diverse income, racial, and ethnic groups together. If they can be brought under one roof the ordinarily beneficial middle-class educational norms are likely to dominate school culture. The cohort you go to school with influences your scores on standardized tests. The famous Coleman report—now 50 years old– showed us that schools were not as powerful as we had hoped they would be: families and neighborhoods had a powerful influence on the achievements of the kids we teach. But recent reanalyses of the Coleman report revealed that those researchers underestimated the power of the cohort with whom kids go to school. Who is in your school matters a lot, and local housing patterns have a big influence on that.

Neighborhood schools, affectionately supported in American folk beliefs as a great equalizer in the melting pot we think of as America,… now perform on school assessments almost exactly as that neighborhoods’ income predicts it will! The neighborhood school in a society with an apartheid-lite housing policy, like ours, is killing us!

In New York and Illinois, over 60 percent of black kids go to schools where 90-100 percent of the kids are nonwhite and mostly poor. In California, Texas and Rhode Island, 50 percent or more of Latino kids go to schools where 90-100 percent of the kids are also not white, and often poor. Similar statistics hold for American Indian kids. And throughout rural America there is almost always a “wrong-side-of-the-tracks” neighborhood, or a trailer park area, in which poorer people are expected to live. The kids in those neighborhoods generally go to schools with the other kids from those neighborhoods. It is properly thought of as an apartheid-lite system of housing. And the test scores that we see in those schools almost always reflect the housing patterns that exist, not the skills of teachers or the competency of the schools’ administrators.

So,… school administrators who are not heavily involved in their community’s housing policies are likely to promote, through neglect, an America most of us do not want. You all know that the percent of poverty in a school almost always informs us of that schools’ test scores. And if the test scores are used to assign letter grades for schools, as is done in some really stupid states, like my own state of Arizona, those letter grades will almost certainly be correlated with poverty. Regardless of how good the administration and teaching in a school actually is, it can be labeled a D school without anyone observing the quality of education provided in that school.

Let me share one of many examples of this high correlation of school district poverty rate, and test score data. This is Nebraska data.

High school districts in Nebraska, School poverty rate, Grade 11 reading and mathematics scores.

Poverty rate and scores on the Nebraska state tests suggest the tests need not be given since the scores are easily and accurately predicted from the poverty rates.   

Clearly school poverty rates tell us a lot about what test scores to expect. And then, in the states that are the dumbest and or the meanest, the test scores are used to determine the letter grades, as if poverty was not an issue. I can illustrate this issue using North Carolina data. Here we have the letter grades associated with percent poverty.

As I said, poverty determines your test scores and your letter grades. And it is foolish to take the bad rap for what is really a society that won’t do more to lower the rate of families in poverty.  

Data such as these makes me say again that housing is a political issue with which you need to be concerned if you care to promote democratic values. The evidence is overwhelming that the wealthier and school-smart kids loose little or nothing in tested ability when placed with poor kids who achieve less. At the same time, the poorer kids frequently do better on those tests than if they were in environments with other poor kids. Parents hate it when I present data like these, and they argue with me. But what I say is frequently true: Mixing social classes and doing away with tracking doesn’t really hurt advantaged kids, while it does advantage the kids we ordinarily think of as disadvantaged! 

Here is data that supports this claim:

Among fourth grade students:

• For every 1 percent increase in middle-class classmates, low income students improved 0.64 percentage point in reading and 0.72 percentage point in math.
• Any given low income student attending an 85% middle class school rather than a 45% middle class school saw “a 20 to 32 percentage point
•  
• David Rusk Study of Madison-Dane County, WI.int improvement in that low-income pupil’s test scores.”

Ok–even in the apartheid-lite system we have, is there some way to provide the necessary rich environments that helps kids to flourish? There sure is. It’s the promotion of high-quality early childhood programs. Thus…I say: You may never have the kind of schools and the test scores you would like to have unless you insure that low income children have access to high quality early childhood education.

What does the US look like compared to many other countries that recognize this fact?

And the richest, though not necessarily the wisest families know this:

These data made me think of Dewey, writing one hundred and fifteen years ago, in School and Society. He wrote,

 “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.”

So…. if parents who are the best educated and wealthiest want high quality preschool for their own kids, we should make such educational opportunities available for all our kids. Not to do so means that too many children of poor families will not profit as well as they might from enrollment in our public schools. Not providing high quality early education is also quite likely to hurt our always fragile democracy!

But what about the costs? What if we spent the huge amount of money necessary to have students of the poor receive high quality preschool experiences? If we did that here is what we can expect in return for that investment:

1, substantially reduced identification of these children as needing special education (that reduces school costs);

2. A much reduced achievement gap between kids in the lowest and highest social classes (that is good for democracy).

3. Reduced health problems throughout that individuals’ life (that is both humane and reduces society’s costs for health care)

4. Reduced dropout rates in high school (that has future tax savings for a community)

5. Increased high-school graduations rates (this also has future tax savings for a community)  

6. higher college attendance rates after high school (this has benefits for the local industries).

 7. Higher employment rates after high school (this increases tax revenues).

8.  Lower incarceration rates as adults (this lowers the costs to the community and state, as well as avoiding the personal tragedies for families with incarcerated relatives). And these 8 factors lead to point 9. Over 30 years high quality early education  provides a return on investment of around 10%.

So…If you live in a community with many poor kids, and you expect that community to still be around 30 years later, it is foolish, perhaps even mean spirited, not to invest in high quality early childhood education.

There is a related issue to address. It’s about what happens to low income kids, compared to high income kids, over summer.

So…. Id add this, You’ll never have the kind of schools you would like, or the test scores you desire, unless you do something about children’s summer school experiences. These should be less about the study of school subjects and more about enrichment, as often happens for the students of wealthier parents during the summer months.

Why do I add this?

Summer Learning & the Achievement Gap

K

Summer

1st

2nd

3rd

4th

Summer Reading Achievement Trajectories

Low-Income Students

Middle-Income Students

Summer

Summer

Summer

Summer

Middle- and upper-class kids have a plethora of opportunities for leaning things in the summer that are school, as well as life related, and that also influences test scores. This wider range of experience gives them a better chance to read with greater comprehension. We know that reading comprehension, and a great deal of our understanding of social studies and science, is based on our experiences in the world in which we grow up. These experiences —on top of the formal school curriculum—make school subjects a lot easier to understand.  Here is what we know about life in contemporary America.

Clearly over the years the gap between wealthier and poorer students, in terms of their enrichment experiences while growing up— things like trips to museums, music lessons, trips to foreign countries, books purchased for them, tutors, and so forth–has grown greater and greater. This cultural and academic knowledge gap between richer and poorer students should be better attended to. It will never go away—but recognizing and addressing this issue is important.

I would add this to my message of how to improve test scores and our nation: You’ll never have the kind of schools or the test scores you would like unless you do something about absenteeism in your district. It’s really a no-brainer! If you don’t attend school you are likely not to learn what school offers. And what schools’ offer is linked (however loosely) with what is on the standardized tests, which are then used inappropriately to judge the quality of a districts’ schools and teachers. Is absence a problem? It sure is.

The first school listed here, the Morrisania school is located in the neighborhood I grew up in. Recent data showes that in this K-5 school, 85% of the kids are poor, and 42% of them have missed a month or more of schooling! If many of your kids miss a month or more of schooling, as is common all across the country, and their test scores are included in your schools’ data, you are being judged for instructional competency by means of a metric that cannot possibly be fair to you under conditions of high absenteeism. You are being judged with tests that assume the content of the tests was taught. The tests assume that students were exposed to the content. And if that is not true,…. how can you allow that to happen to yourselves? You either need to fix the absenteeism rates by devoting a lot of money to children and their families, probably by hiring many more social workers, or demand that those scores be removed from the data base that is used to judge a schools performance. Look at these data.

These data suggest that High Asian test scores and low American Indian and African American test scores may have a lot more to do with who actually shows up to school, rather than any alleged differences in ability!

Here is more on why social workers might be needed.

Finally, let me say what I expect all of you know too well: You’ll never have the kind of schools or the test scores you would like unless you do something about pay for qualified educational staff—teachers, bus drivers, counselors, librarians, nurses, social workers, and so forth.  Instead of administrators telling teachers and other staff not to strike, as was the case in Arizona and Los Angeles, they should be telling legislators and school board members that they cannot guarantee a high-quality educational experience for the children of their state with unqualified teachers and staff, and the resulting high levels of churn associated with that kind of staffing. Besides effects on achievement, teacher churn raises educational costs dramatically. The hiring of a new teacher can easily cost $15,000 per replaced teacher if replacements can be found. And in contemporary America that is harder and harder to accomplish.

Teachers leave the field for at least three reasons. Because they are not respected by politicians and newspapers, which demoralizes them; Because they burn our emotionally and physically since teaching is a lot harder than the public thinks it is; and because they do not make as much as other college grads in their states. By the way—NPR reported on Monday that Walmart truck drivers are now averaging $87,500 a year. At the same time average elementary teacher pay in the highest paying state in the union, New York, is about $80,000, and the average in my state of AZ is $44,000, half of what is earned by Arizona’s Walmart drivers.

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Here is a list of states that do and do not pay teachers a living wage. Remember, this is not a good wage. It is a living wage. It is what you need to survive, not thrive as a family. It’s the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs such as food, housing, and clothing. The goal of a living wage is to allow a worker to afford a basic standard of living—and 30 states will not provide their teachers that minimum level of support. Here is more on teacher pay.

That’s a gap in 2017 of $339 a week, $1,356 per month, and $16,272 a year between teachers and other college grads. And the gains in salary made by teachers in inflation adjusted dollars, from 2000 to 2017, was negative in most states. In Indiana and Colorado teachers lost about 15% of their purchasing power. In North Carolina and Michigan they lost about 12% of their purchasing power. In my state of Arizona teachers lost about 10% of their purchasing power from 2000-2017. Our governor offered a 1% pay raise! With public support teachers walked out and won a 20% pay raise over the next 3 years. The result will give them the same purchasing power they had in 2000, and will not reduce the gap in pay vis-a-vis  other college graduates. 

 And you need to know that Teach for America teachers and alternatively certified teachers, both of whom are often paid less, and employed almost exclusively in districts that are underfunded, leave teaching at the highest rates. Thus, the poorest districts incur the highest costs for recruiting teachers for their classrooms. Recent data on turnover rates inform us that,… compared with regularly certified teachers,…. alternatively certified teachers are at 44% greater risk of abandoning their classrooms during the school year. And they are 152% more likely to leave the school at which they work at the end of the school year.  Teach for America teachers also abandon their classes (and their contracts) at very high rates both within the school year, and also at the end of their first school year. Indeed, at the end of their 5^th year, only about 15% of TFA recruits continue to teach in the same low-income schools to which they were originally assigned.

Further, despite their claims, Teach for America teachers are not “better” teachers for low income kids. Though they may not be worse than other new teachers, they are not as good as experienced teachers who have been through a traditional teacher education program. Districts need to pay enough to keep experienced teachers for the simplest of reasons– they are a lot better at their job!

Experience matters and churn hurts schools. If America wants better schools as well as higher tests scores, America needs to pay higher wages and run schools that are fully staffed.

So now, as an old researcher, here is what I think: 1. Using state monies to subsidize charter and private schools is really a problem for me. They not only take away monies from the public schools—about 1 billion over the last decade in Arizona–but the vast majority of them won’t admit to their schools many of the kids that need special attention. Poor kids, special ed kids, and English language learners both reduce profits and lower test scores. So these schools take public money but will not serve the public, and therefor they are a malevolent force in our democracy. 2. I am deeply unhappy about our nations’ mindless commitment to high stakes testing, when everyone in research knows that outside of school factors play 6 times more of a role in determining classroom and school test scores than do the personnel at those schools. Nevertheless, if we want our public schools to be the best they can be, and their test scores to be higher than they are, than this is what I say:

You’ll never have the kind of schools and test scores you would like to have:

1. Unless you do something about making your state a better place to live in, to work in and in which to raise children.

• Unless you do something about your community’s housing patterns.

• Unless you insure that low income children have access to high quality early childhood education.

• Unless you do something about children’s summer school experiences. These should be less about the study of school subjects and more about enrichment, as often happens for wealthier students during the summer months.

• Unless you do something about absenteeism in your district.

• Unless you do something about pay for qualified educational staff—teachers, bus drivers, counselors, librarians, nurses, social workers, and so forth.