Why Do Advanced Students Have Such a Hard Time Succeeding?

I rarely write about personal things on this blog, and instead try to stay somewhat objective.  But today I shall make a small exception due to having a discussion with a friend who made some valid points.  I'd be curious to get some feedback, because this is something that has run through my mind many times.

I have the dubious pleasure of being the parent of a gifted child, one who is in fact considered to be twice-exceptional.  This means that whilst there is significant advanced capabilities in some areas, there are also delays in others.  So they have advanced needs and an IEP.

So onto the conversation; I was complaining that the school should be happy to have gifted students, and I didn't understand their reluctance to help an advanced student the opportunity to succeed as it reflects well on the school.  Here are the reasons that schools might not want to help your gifted (NOT high achiever, Type A; know the difference!) child.  This doesn't go into the whole problem about teachers not being sufficiently trained to recognise giftedness (although in the context of this post, thats very convenient too), but more goes to addressing the problems gifted kids have when they KNOW they have a gifted kid in their class.

1. Budget. Schools are beaten into keeping budgets. Kids with differences cost time and money, unless they're (financially beneficial?) disabilities which do bring in extra funding.
2. Testing. Once a child isn't failing, they don't matter. Kids that don't function well bring in more resources. Once they hit average, they do not bring anything more than base funding in. No state gives funding for helping gifted, only to bring the unsuccessful up kids up to the "accepted standard".  So why give extra help to the two kids that get 100% in all of the tests, since they help to raise the average score in your class, moving them on would simply impact the average score.  They don't need help they're doing just fine.  NCLB specifically discriminates against gifted kids.
3. Teachers are humans. They don't, except in outside cases, want to do extra work for no extra money, sure there are the "Mother Theresa's" of teaching who would teach for free under any circumstances just to help the kids, but by and large, they want to go home and get their dinner, mark their papers and wash their kid's karate uniform for tomorrow.  For the most part human nature is such that people don't dedicate the majority their mental bandwidth figuring out how they can do a better job each day, these days a mental dialogue looks more like "oh geez!! I'm late paying the water bill, Johnny has a sleep over in two days and I need to get food in.  Lisa has a cold but still wants to go to soccer practice, do I keep her home? John is on a work trip next week and I have the kids on my own, that's going to be rough.  I really need to get my hair cut..... "  and so on.
4. Teach to Test Recognition. Again a teacher is human, and humans in general crave praise and recognition. A teachers performance is assessed based on the grades of their students, the kids get great grades the teacher gets a pat on the back.  All of the kids in the class pass with top scores, the teacher gets recognised, perhaps awarded, and honoured. This looks great on a resume.  So as a teacher it's only natural that you want to do the "best job" you can do. That job no longer includes teaching kids, it's almost entirely based on tracking metrics via testing, so obviously the teacher wants the best little tester that he or she could have. 
5. Administration.  A school has enough problems keeping on top of the mandatory paperwork as it is.  A child that doesn't fit the norm surely generates more admin, more paperwork, more effort on the part of the school administration.  Conforming to average is good for the administration.

I could have all, or part of this entirely wrong, and if that's the case, I look forward to people providing me reasons as to why kids like mine and my friends' are left to languish in classes that are at least one or two grades below where they need to be learning?  

Chronological Advancement is Illogical, Dogmatic and Archaic

I've not written a post in sometime, because I've been working hard dealing with the "realities" of the public school system as it exists today.  I see lots of people talking about how an overhaul of the public school systems is urgently required; I see yet others claiming that the system needs to be torn down and completely rebuilt from the ground up.  Yet I also thought about some possible ways to solve the problems in the current system; here's one that's been pushed around for a while, so I'm going to add my voice to this, apparently relatively easy fix.

Why do we insist on grouping children by age.  The chronological approach to teaching is inflexible, dogmatic, and archaic.  It serves no purpose other than to enforce bright kids to study with kids that aren't as bright or maybe have difficulties in certain areas.   If child gets held back a year because he hasn't learned the content sufficiently (and when I say content, of course I actually mean "to pass the test"), it's a source of humiliation to the child (you just made him look dumb in front of all the other kids that managed just fine)  and to his parents ("Hey how's Johnny doing? He's in 5th grade now right?".  If the kid was acting out because he realised he wasn't at the same level as the rest of the class, then by holding him back a year, we've just entrenched his resent for the school system even more deeply.  Do we expect him to come back from this and do great things with his life?  I think not, all the positive reinforcement and sticker charts in the world are unlikely to make these kids a cheerleader of the school system.  Also we only get to advance the bright kids once a year, doesn't matter how much smarter you are, you get advanced with the rest of your class, no matter how stellar your performance (with the exception of very very rare instances, where the parents and school both agree and push for this, I can count the number of times I've heard about this happening on the fingers of one hand)

Isn't it much smarter to advance these according to ability, as needed?  Let's look at this for one moment.  There would be no need for a "No Child Left Behind" program since each child would be taught according to ability rather than age.  The kids that are naturally smart would get advanced once they outgrow the capabilities of the class they are currently in.  There would be less stress on the teachers to feel like they were neglecting the kids that need extra help because everyone would be at a similar level in the classroom.  The stress on the students that were unable to advance as fast as the other kids would be reduced, since they would always be surrounded by intellectually similar peers.

And if you take a look at vocational education and qualifications this is exactly how it works, and works very successfully I might add.  Can you imagine the absurdity of wanting to train a project manager as a natural progression of your career and being told I'm sorry, you can't take that course/learn that material until you're <N> years old. No, it simply doesn't happen except in our broken education system.  If I'm capable of taking a course and can meet the prerequisites of attending that course and/or exam, then I do so.  I might have 18 year olds on the course, I might have 58 year old students on the course with me, and no one cares, no one cares in the slightest about any age difference since we're all there to learn the same information.

I'll admit I'm biased, because it's an idea I think would work.  I'd love to hear the reasons why this wouldn't work.

The Church of Education

The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession

I'm sure this book has been around for sometime now.  I've not managed to get around to it yet, but it is on my list of books to read; however it does raise some interesting points.

If you're not familiar with it (and again I have not yet read it) it deals with the attitude towards the teachers of the education system, how and why they're maligned, or revered.

To me, and as is probably quite evident from this blog, I don't really blame (or praise) the teachers one way or another.  It's not that the teachers are good or bad, caring or uncaring, the problem is with the education religion; that is to say that the teachers themselves are probably a great bunch of guys, but I beleive that they buy into the education dogma, and the education religion.  Putting blind faith in a system that rarely gets objectively evaluated.

Now I know there are a ton of people out there saying to themselves "I know a teacher..." or "I'm a teacher...", "who reads about new educational methods from cutting edge educational leaders all the time; I'm always trying to further my understanding and abilities".   Anyone should be admired for trying to better their knowledge, and expand on their abilities, self-improvement is at the root of personal progress.  The difference is whether your self-improvement reinforces what you already beleive with a fresh angle, or whether you are pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone into areas that really make you think differently.  For example, if I want a fresh perspective on the church, should I go and speak to a pastor? Or would that give me a slightly different perspective on what I already think I know?

I beleive many teachers are the same way and for the most part and I think a public that maligns teachers for doing the best job they can in a system that is so deeply flawed is a little naive and short-sighted.  The teachers at a grass roots level buy into this stuff, they go to University, and learn education from professional educators that assisted in building the system as it exists today; or to put it another way, they're going to the Church of Education, to learn from the Pastors, and Priests, and in some cases Prophets (or should that read profits?).  They are taught how to contribute to the post-war revolution of building lots of new little cogs for the post-industrial machine; this is where the system is flawed.  You can't blame the congregation for the flaw of the church (cult?), all you can do is wonder why no one else is seeing past the dogma and making their own minds up about things, how many truly think critically about it?

I'm not going to make my mind up about the book until I've read it, I beleive that there are good able members of the congregation and less able ones.  I think the answer to why Johnny can't read, may be easy to attribute to potential teacher failings (as the public so often does), but I think the problem runs far deeper in a system that values test results over ability and strength.

I look forward to reading this book with interest.

What is Critical Thinking?

I'm guessing that since I opened this particular can of worms, it behooves me to be clear about the terms I'll be talking about in coming posts.  So here's a statement by Michael Scriven & Richard Paul, presented at the 8th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking and Education Reform, Summer 1987.

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.

It entails the examination of those structures or elements of thought implicit in all reasoning: purpose, problem, or question-at-issue; assumptions; concepts; empirical grounding; reasoning leading to conclusions; implications and consequences; objections from alternative viewpoints; and frame of reference. Critical thinking — in being responsive to variable subject matter, issues, and purposes — is incorporated in a family of interwoven modes of thinking, among them: scientific thinking, mathematical thinking, historical thinking, anthropological thinking, economic thinking, moral thinking, and philosophical thinking. 

Critical thinking can be seen as having two components: 1) a set of information and belief generating and processing skills, and 2) the habit, based on intellectual commitment, of using those skills to guide behaviour. It is thus to be contrasted with: 1) the mere acquisition and retention of information alone, because it involves a particular way in which information is sought and treated; 2) the mere possession of a set of skills, because it involves the continual use of them; and 3) the mere use of those skills ("as an exercise") without acceptance of their results.

There are many definitions but this seems to the most useful that I've found, you can find the full definition from the page it came from here: https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766

I think the key points that I find salient are in the second half of the third paragraph where the contrast is stated, specifically, "...the mere acquisition and retention of information alone..." because this is how the teach-to-test system works, they're not teaching our kids to solve problems, they're teaching them to retain specific information and have a specific approach to solving a specific set of predefined problems (the test agenda).

I've worked in the IT industry for some time now.  I recall the time that Microsoft originally introduced the MCSE qualification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Certified_Professional#Microsoft_Certified_Solutions_Expert_.28MCSE.29), as is typical in the IT certification world, each test is based on a collection of multiple choice questions, but the fervour surrounding the qualifications was intense, and it was widely known that if you were an MCSE, then your skills were highly sought after and money would shower down upon you in abundance.   The natural progression of this was for a large quantity of IT training companies to appear that taught to the test.  In other words, they new what questions were going to be asked in the exams and taught curricula specifically around this.  I recall this experience because I ran a team of engineers that were almost all MCSE certified by these teach to test schools, and after passing were thrust out in to the work place as "domain experts", because they had the piece of paper to prove this.  Now some were adaptable (remember schools still weren't quite as broken as they are now), and they were able to take some of the knowledge and apply it in creative way; yet others had been trained by their schools to pass exams, not so awesome, because when some of these domain experts were asked to perform a particular set of technical skills, the response was "we weren't taught how to do that!".  I know from experience that the things I was asking them to do, weren't a great leap from the things they'd learned, but their lack of critical thinking prevented them from taking the information they already have and using it as reference to base the extrapolation of a solution to the problem at hand.

To take the above example a step further, imagine that the majority of people in the work place have been conditioned to be able to pass tests instead of think, the future might look pretty bleak.  Now imagine the converse, where the majority of people in the workplace, are not only well educated but have the ability to model the sum of their experiences, their knowledge, their background and turn them into solutions to abstract problems.....  which do you think holds the key to a brighter future for humanity?

Teach to Test

I have some very strong views about education and teaching.  First off, I think it's important to point out that I'm not an education professional; I a parent with school aged kids first and foremost. Secondly I'm a recent import to the USA, I was educated in the UK originally, so I probably have a different set of benchmarks to work within than perhaps other parents in a similar situation to me.  This should prove to be an excellent starting point for professional educators to question my validity of my personal opinions on the subject.

I called this blog "Teach to Test" because it's one of the frustrations I currently experience as a parent and a great example of many of the things that are wrong with education today.   I don't believe the title is as important as the content, so I'm not that concerned about it.

When I was looking at schools to teach my children, one of the most important things for me, was that they taught critical thinking and creative thinking, both of these things are extremely important to me. In my professional life I've found that having the ability to create mental models, apply those models to different situations and thereby solve the problems has proven to be key in some of the most successful people I've met (and I've met a lot).  Success doesn't mean monetary success, although admittedly many of the successful people I've met have also been wealthy; what I actually mean is becoming extremely adept at anything you choose to pursue, and to stand out amongst others in the same field.   Creativity plays a huge role in this.

My disappointment is that despite searching extensively and finding a school for my kids which said all of the right things and made all of the right noises, I find after placement that they still teach to test, and testing is the most important thing for them.  Now I don't agree with this, but I do understand why they do it.  Obviously the better the grades that are achieved by the school, the better the quality of students they attract, they become "the school to get your kids into" because they're the best test scores in town, and with that recognition (I'm assuming) it becomes easier to secure better teachers and more budget, etc.  I'd opine that the knock-on effects are manifold.

All of this is wonderful, assuming you want your little one to grow up being able to pass tests, and regurgitate information on queue, to go on and become a 4.0 student with awesome test scores that is potentially useless to future employers.  For them to go to a great university and gain an awesome degree packed full of information they'll never use, and carry a student debt for a large chunk of their adult lives.  To be a carbon copy of their parents, perhaps?

I understand that this is a very contentious and inflammatory remark and will ruffle many feathers. That's kind of what I'm hoping for, since nobody ever paid a second thought to a point of view that they agreed with, they simply nod politely and go on their merry way.  I have many opinions (and that's exactly what they are, my opinions), that I will assert here, and my hope is to, maybe, make people think and challenge their comfortable cotton-wool-wrapped-reality with some things that maybe they don't agree with.

You be the judge.  Watch this space.