Where is the proof?

There's a good column in a local Georgia newspaper that I ran across today, arguing against the state's school schedule, which begins in early August. The columnist asks, where is the proof that an earlier start to the school year improves education? According to him, the folks over at Georgians Need Summers haven't found any evidence to back up the early school start.

Some of the columnist's arguments about the necessity of summer sound quite a bit like homeschooling arguments:

We've lost practically all of August. The traditional months of summer have been truncated. We get less true summer time to spend with Big Momma, see movies, have sleepovers, play basketball, read, and yes — succumb, even, to boredom. Our dog days of summer are spent in class, not poolside.

This year, all of the state's public schools will open up by Aug. 15. Next Monday, Gwinnett's 142,000 or so students join others returning to class in eight other city and county school systems in the Atlanta area. Some school systems, like those in Cherokee and Newton county, are already in school or start Monday.

. . .

I do know this: You can get an education when you spend a week or two sleeping at grandma's house, especially if she lives in the country.

A full summer of employment might teach you something, too.

And who knows what great things can be born out of boredom? Especially if it's not combatted with TV.

"These people who argue that their children get bored during the summer — they need to be bored," Holt said. "They need to be bored so they use their imagination, and do something. Figure out what to do. That's one of the things I like about summer."

Georgians Need Summers has been lobbying the General Assembly to adopt a uniform school calendar, one where school starts no earlier than late August. The Cobb County organization gets a rash of calls and hits to its Web site whenever it's mentioned in stories about calendar protests. And Holt says that for every 10 people she talks to about the issue, nine think early start dates are a bad idea.

I had been thinking along the lines of "where is the proof" earlier today, while reading a Des Moines Register editorial asking that summer school be made mandatory for students who fail a certain standardized test, and that the duration of summer school should be doubled. The editorial laments: "It's hard to understand why parents blow the opportunity for their children to catch up." And: "If students don't master basic skills, they'll risk falling behind all their lives and becoming stuck in low-paying jobs." (God am I tired of the notion that what you are at 5 years or 10 years or 15 years of age determines the entirety of the rest of your life. If that is true there is something seriously wrong with our society.)

What's the evidence that summer school is useful? If you can't teach a kid to pass the standardized test even though you've got them 6 hours a day for 180 days, why should we believe you can do it with yet more hours and hours of schooling? It's like I said in an earlier post: When you're digging yourself into a hole, the first rule is to stop digging.

The gall of the Des Moines paper to say "it's hard to understand" why parents would want to give their kids a full summer vacation! It doesn't even occur to them that we might question the utility and success of schools. The only conceivable problem with schooling, in the minds of too many Americans, is that there isn't enough of it.

Back to school shopping

It's a nice little perk, for someone like me who hates to shop, that I don't have to go out during the back to school rush to buy supplies and clothing. And it's quite a rush:

According to the findings of the new National Retail Federation's "2005 Back-to-School Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey," conducted by BIGresearch, families with school-aged children will spend an average of only $443.77 on back-to-school items. That figure is down 8.2% from the $483.28 expectation found in last year's survey.

Overall, the NRF estimates that back-to-school spending will reach $13.39 billion this year, down from $14.79 billion last year.

Who knew back-to-school shopping was a $14 billion occasion? Another article quotes a JC Penney store manager as saying: "It’s probably the biggest nonholiday rush we have all year."

Just for fun, compare this to what homeschoolers spend on homeschooling:

Another obstacle that seems to be overcome in homeschooling is the need to spend a great deal of money in order to have a good education. In Strengths of Their Own, Dr. Ray found the average cost per homeschool student is $546 while the average cost per public school student is $5,325.

It isn't a perfect comparison, since I highly suspect that most of the money spent back to school shopping is spent on clothing. (JC Penney doesn't sell pens and paper, to my knowledge.) A homeschooler probably wouldn't count clothing as a school expense, so that's not included in the average homeschooling total. On the other hand, when you homeschool, your child doesn't need 5 different pairs of brand name jeans and a $100 pair of sneakers in order to avoid being teased at school. Much of the additional clothing expense associated with going back to school may be necessitated by the school environment.

In any case, I think it's fair to say that homeschooling doesn't cost a whole lot more than what parents usually spend on back to school shopping. If you throw in the busing and sports fees which parents increasingly are asked to pay (e.g. $200 per student for busing and $100 per student for athletics), home education is probably cheaper.

Testing will save us

In Tuesday's Christian Science Monitor they're running an editorial letter to the editor arguing that No Child Left Behind and testing generally has been a great thing for American children. It's only left-wing dogma, the author implies, which is preventing us from rejoicing. I thought I'd take a closer look.

According to Thomas Sowell, author of this rant:

Not only have test scores in math and reading shown "solid gains" in the words of The New York Times, young black students have "significantly narrowed the gap" between themselves and white students. All this is based on official annual data from 28,000 schools across the country.

What is especially revealing is that it is the young black students who have made the largest gains while older minority students "scored as far behind whites as in previous decades."

In other words, the children whose education has taken place mostly since the No Child Left Behind Act show the greatest gains, while for those whose education took place mostly under the old system, it was apparently too late to repair the damage.

First of all, he's making a classic mistake of misunderstanding the word "significant" in the context of statistical results. "Significant" just means "not likely to be due to chance." It does not mean "important." I went and looked up the New York Times article, and the test results in question were based on 28,000 students (not schools, as Sowell says, but students). That's a huge sample size, and it pretty much guarantees that any shift in the numbers will be unlikely to be due to random luck, because it takes one heck of a fluke in the data collection to sway 28,000 data points. But is it an important change? A substantial change? A dramatic improvement that proves that standardized testing improves education?

Well, no. Young black students used to be 35 points behind whites on reading tests, on average. Now they're 26 points behind on average. But this is a 9-point improvement on a 500 point scale. The gap shrunk by a quarter, yes, but it's an improvement of 1.8% of the total scale. Furthermore, two of the five years during which this improvement took place were prior to NCLB. As for "solid gains," yes, whites gained 5 points (2.3% better) and blacks gained 14 (7.5% better), but since students have been increasingly instructed on how to take the test, I am not sure one can attribute these small increases to substantial improvements in reading. They could simply have improved at test-taking.

I don't buy it, either, that older kids (13- and 17-year-olds) were so "damaged" by early education that there was no helping them, and therefore we can't expect NCLB to do them any good. That's rather a convenient explanation, isn't it? Write off this current generation of teenagers, concentrate on the younger kids... who coincidentally are the only ones who show improvement post-NCLB. I'm just not willing to write off 13-year-olds as damaged goods.

It goes on:

Take something as basic as what teachers should be doing in the classroom. Should teachers be "conveyors of knowledge who enlighten their students with what they know"? Or should teachers "see themselves as facilitators of learning who enable their students to learn on their own"?

Ninety two percent of the professors of education said that teachers should be "facilitators" rather than engaging in what is today called "directed instruction" - and what used to be called just plain teaching.

The fashionable phrase among educators today is that the teacher should not be "a sage on the stage" but "a guide on the side."

Is the 92 percent vote for the guide over the sage based on any hard evidence, any actual results? No. It has remained the prevailing dogma in schools of education during all the years when test scores stagnated and American children have been repeatedly outperformed in international tests by children from other countries.

Wow, it's news to me that American teachers have been letting kids learn on their own for years and years. When I was in school that was not the case. I remember actually wanting to sit there and read my textbook and being prevented. I remember being chastised for reading ahead. I remember mimeographs, handwriting exercises (is there any proof these work? isn't it just that one's fine motor skills improve with age?), etc. In 7th grade I was made to write the 5-paragraph theme, with 5 sentences per paragraph: introduction of thesis, three supporting sentences, conclusion. And my teacher actually handed out lined worksheets, labeled as to which sentence and which paragraph we were writing. I'd certainly call that directed.

I'd bet that teachers do want to be a "guide on the side," but the institution prevents them. Who has time to simply provide materials and let kids go at it? You'd need time to wait through the initial lack of enthusiasm, the cynicism, the boredom, until finally somebody picked up a book and risked becoming interested. This does not occur in a 50-minute period. You have 50 minutes and someone else has decided what your students must learn in that time frame-- so you have to hop to it, you have to start cramming facts down their throats and backing it up with so much repetitive homework that they'll be able to regurgitate these facts while taking tests. I do not think we have had a fair test of allowing teachers to actually be a guide or a facilitator of child-directed learning. I can't recall anything being self-directed from my school days.

Anyway, the editorial goes on:

American children have been particularly outperformed in math, usually ending up at or near the bottom in international math tests. But this has not made a dent in the US education establishment's dogma about the way to teach math.

What is more important in math, that children "know the right answers to the questions" or that they "struggle with the process" of trying to find the right answers? Among professors of education, 86 percent choose "struggling" over knowing.

This is all part of a larger vision in which children "discover" their own knowledge rather than have teachers pass on to them the knowledge of what others have already discovered. The idea that children will "discover" knowledge that took scholars and geniuses decades, or even generations, to produce is truly a faith which passeth all understanding.

This is just absolutely silly. Allowing a child to learn math at their own pace is hardly equivalent to expecting them to deduce the laws of algebra on their own. That's ridiculous.

He goes on:

What about discipline problems in our schools? Fewer than half of the professors of education considered discipline "absolutely essential" to the educational process. As one professor of education put it, "When you have students engaged and not vessels to receive information, you tend to have fewer discipline problems."

All the evidence points in the opposite direction. But what is mere evidence compared with education dogma?

Well, funnily enough, Dr. Sowell doesn't provide any evidence either. "All evidence points" to massive harm done by lack of discipline, he claims... but, well, I guess he'll cover that in some other editorial.

Again, it seems self-evident that teaching kids how to take a test causes kids to do better on tests. My question is, does that have anything to do with real education, knowledge, or (ultimately) quality of life?

But Dr. Sowell doesn't care about the intangibles. What he wants is what's quantifiable: evidence, he calls it. Numbers is what he means. The numbers are better, the numbers have improved-- we must be on the right track. Never mind that the data are attached to real human beings whose knowledge and intelligence is too individual and complex to be accurately measured by any means.

Why we homeschool... some thoughts

I found an great list of 55 reasons to homeschool at the National Home Education Network site. I can relate to all of them, but I'm still pondering what the core reason is, in our case. A couple of days ago someone asked me why we decided to homeschool, and I said, "Well, my kids really want their autonomy... it just wouldn't have been a good match for us." This may be the key reason for me: protecting their independence.

Our society values obedience in children more than any other characteristic, if you sort out lip service from the way we actually treat kids. Even the most progressive of people will usually be quick to denounce the "little monsters" they've had experience with, although personally I don't see that much bad behavior when I'm out and about. I guess people remember the occasional tantrum or argument because they're so shocked when a kid doesn't click their heels and say javohl, but they fail to notice kids much in normal circumstances.

My kids aren't particularly obedient (not that this applies to T. yet, but I can see the writing on the wall!). If you can give A. a good reason why we do things a certain way, she'll listen to you and usually do what you're asking. But if you want her not to wear orange shorts with a purple shirt, well, good luck explaining that one! She won't do what an adult asks just because they're an adult, and I wouldn't want her to. I want her to question arbitrary rules, I don't want her to be a conformist. All of this goes against what is necessary in the classroom, which is obedience. Because school has taken over so much of childhood, demands for obedience have taken over too much of our relationships with children, in my view.

Incidentally, the woman who wrote that seminal paper criticizing "permissive parenting" turns out to be a promoter of corporal punishment. A nice rebuttal to her pro-spanking editorial is here. You may figure you aren't a permissive parent anyway, so this doesn't apply. But do you:

...behave in an acceptant and affirmative manner towards the child's impulses. desires. and actions. She [the parent] consults with him [the child] about policy decisions and gives explanations for family rules. She makes few demands for household responsibility and orderly behavior. She presents herself to the child as a resource for him to use as he wishes, not as an active agent responsible for shaping or altering his ongoing or future behavior. She allows the child to regulate his own activities as much as possible, avoids the exercise of control, and does not encourage him to obey externally defined standards. She attempts to use reason but not overt power to accomplish her ends.

Though you may demand a bit more from your kids in terms of cleaning up or being polite, this may sound similar to your parenting. In her book, then, you're a permissive parent. I certainly qualify, and it doesn't bother me in the least that Ms. Baumrind disapproves. (She can take her PhD and....)

As I say, protecting my kids' independence and autonomy, insofar as possible (safety and parental sanity being important considerations), means that for us homeschooling was an obvious choice.

Card games

Today I found a web page with the rules to various kids' card games. You can also find the rules to more complicated games at the same site. Be sure to click on their Commercial Games page for a slew of games with special cards.

I remember playing a very simple but quick game, aptly named Speed, with my best friend as a kid. It was a race to get rid of your cards and went extremely fast, with the result that we spent more time shuffling than actually playing, but we loved that game. The basic idea was that there were two face-up piles on which you could play a higher or lower card (e.g. you could play a 6 or an 8 on a 7, or a king or a 2 on an ace, and the suits were irrelevant). You kept playing up and down on both piles as fast as you could, replenishing your hand of five cards from your own draw pile, until someone had no more cards left and had won the game. So simple, but frenzied and stressful and therefore fun. I also recall that we went through a Canasta phase (though I couldn't tell you a thing about how that's played or what the rules are). Solitaire was also big-- at one time I think I knew 11 different solitaire games.

While I'm at it, I really recommend the card game Set. Kids can beat adults at this one!

Learning to write

My brother learned to read mostly over one Christmas vacation, during which he went from the lowest reading group to the highest one in his second-grade class. Another homeschooled girl I met didn't start reading until she was 7, but over roughly a six month period she accelerated to 3rd grade reading level. John Gatto says he learned to read because his grandmother read to him every day while he sat in her lap, and she ran her finger along under the words. But because there is no room for differing timelines in institutional schooling, learning to read is perceived as a difficult and somewhat mysterious process. Nor can anyone agree on the "right" or "best" way to teach reading, which, if you're following your child's lead on a day-to-day basis, is a moot debate.

A. is going about things in quite a different way, for instance. She is not learning to read, she is learning to write. Every day she makes signs to place around the house. Yesterday she pretended that Bratty Brat (an imaginary friend/enemy) had stolen her cat Cherry, and asked me how to spell the name of our street and the word "LOST," which she wrote beneath drawings of cats on various signs. She probably spelled LOST and CLOVER DR a half dozen times. This is also how she learned to spell our names, the words Mom and Dad, Cherry, Harry Potter, and various menu items for when she plays restaurant. And she'll happily get out the letter blocks and we'll construct words and sentences.

But read what someone else wrote? What's the point in that? Sure, it's fun to pick out a word here or there on rare occasions, but that's just for kicks. The important thing, to A's mind, is to be able to express herself. Writing a story is a goal; reading someone else's story is not.

This doesn't surprise me, because A. seems to be a natural unschooler. I tried to talk her into swimming lessons this summer, and she told me that she already knows how to swim, and if she wants to swim better she will ask me how, and that she doesn't want anyone "telling me how to do it," as she put it. Ms. Independence. Similarly gymnastics classes are out, since, as she explained, she already knows how to do somersaults, stand on one leg, walk on a log, jump, dance, and fly (she swears she's getting better at jumping and eventually she'll be able to fly). Anyway, I can still do cartwheels, so A. says I can teach her-- but only when she asks me to.

So this will be the story I'll tell in a few years: "Oh, A?" I'll say. "She learned to write around age 5 or 6... reading didn't come until a couple of years later."

Back from vacation!

I'm back, and should be blogging again regularly. My husband is back at work, and the two of us have finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which wild horses couldn't have dragged me away from (let alone blogs).

My husband kindly went out and bought two copies of the book at 6:30am this past Saturday, and we finished it Sunday night. I think it's the best one yet, quite witty and funny in places, very archetypal/Jungian in spots, and leaving us with fodder for all sorts of speculation, mystery, and discussion.

J K Rowling has done very few interviews with regular journalists, preferring to be interviewed by kids and the leaders of a couple of major fan sites. Having read a few book reviews, it's no wonder she eschews the usual media. It's not that they're critical, it's that they do not pay attention to details and they get things totally wrong. One of these reviewers said something about book 6 teaching "the perils of love," which goes to show that this person completely missed the books' entire philosophy of love conquering evil, misunderstood what happens in the death scene (they should check out what the 12-year-olds are saying on the discussion boards before writing their next review), and basically came to exactly the opposite conclusion than was intended, I'm quite sure. Can't they get someone to review the books who's actually read them? Can't they hire a 9-year-old, next time around?

True, I'm a Potter fanatic for purely recreational reasons, but I've long thought that these books were increasing reading ability and vocabulary for kids the world over, probably along with ethics and morals. Also, the books are like mystery novels, full of clues to decipher, requiring reasoning and deduction and a lot of hard thinking. It took readers less than a day to develop a consensus theory on the identity of R. A. B., though I might never have gotten there myself (RAB is quite obscure in previous books). Someone on an online discussion forum excitedly pointed out that there was a locket that couldn't be opened at 12 Grimmauld Place, mentioned in book 5, which could be the locket. My husband and I were amazed-- it turns out that yes, a locket is mentioned, in a few words in the midst of a longer sentence, on a single page within the hundreds of pages of book 5. How on earth could anyone remember that? But at this point Rowling knows her fans will remember it, that they'll find that handful of words and make the connection, because they've been doing it now for years. We pore over the text like Sherlock Holmes, never overlooking so much as cigar ash, because it could turn out to be meaningful. That has to have some "educational" value as well.

All that aside, they're just hilarious and imaginative and incredibly fun to read. I'm still chuckling at Luna Lovegood commentating that Quidditch match....

The problem with experts

Lately I've been thinking more generally about the control of information. Institutional schools train people to look to the experts rather than to hunt down information on their own, as I argued in my last post. Educating yourself gives you the freedom to seek out non-mainstream opinions, and that's a very good thing, because the 'expert' system has some serious flaws. I'm starting to think of this system as an intellectual oligarchy, for which we are prepared by decades of schooling.

A dangerous problem with the oligarchy is that people are required to make a name for themselves in an area of research before their results will be taken seriously. You could make an astounding scientific discovery, but if it's not in your field, if you have no previous publications on the topic (publications which usually require a PhD), if you're not from the right sort of university, well, good luck getting it published. If this sounds a bit exaggerated, please keep reading, because I have a rather horrifying example.

I was reading Flu by Gina Kolata some time ago, about the 1918-1919 flu pandemic which broke out at the end of World War I, and killed far more people than the war did. The virus is estimated to have infected at least one fifth of all living people, and killed more than 2% of the human population worldwide. It killed almost 13,000 people in Philadelphia in a period of weeks. In many US cities they could not bury their dead.

Naturally, it has been of tremendous interest to determine the genes of this virus. One question is why this flu triggered a "cytokine storm," in which a person essentially is drowned by their own T-cells, which are trying to fight the virus. T-cells flood the lungs until oxygen is cut off and the person dies. Other flus do not kill in this way, and other flus usually kill the very young or the elderly, while the 1918 flu was most deadly to those aged 20 to 40. It was suspected that the 1918 virus was evolved from an avian flu, but DNA would help shed light on its origins-- and help us recognize the next virulent avian virus that might cause a similar pandemic. This is of particular interest right now, since the H5N1 avian flu in Asia has evolved to be contagious between humans, and may have broken out in China. (Excellent H5N1 news here.)

S0... enter Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, an army pathologist. Dr. Taubenberger found lung tissue samples from a WWI soldier, preserved in paraffin in an army warehouse. His team identified the flu virus within the tissue. They developed a method for determining the genes of the virus. Let me quote from Kolata's book, pp. 215-216:

By October 1996, the group was ready to tell the world that they had genetic evidence of the 1918 flu in the preserved lung tissue of Roscoe Vaughan. They would write a scientific paper explaining their astonishing result. They did not have the entire genetic sequence of the virus yet, but they had shown that they could pull the viral genes out. That meant that they eventually might know the virus in its every detail. They had the tools to unmask the murderer and even find its deadly weapon.

The scientists decided to send their paper to Nature. Certain that what they had found was electrifying, they gave the journal editors advance notice that their paper was on its way. "I emailed the Washington office of Nature," Taubenberger said. "An hour and a half later, I got a phone call from London," from the editorial offices of the journal, "saying, 'This is really great, send it right in.'" He did, expecting that "this paper would get sucked right in," published posthaste. But, to Tauben­berger’s amazement, upon receiving his paper, Nature sent it right back, rejecting it without even mailing it to experts for review. The journal included its standard rejection note, explaining that the flu paper was not interesting enough for review.

Baffled, Taubenberger then sent the paper to Science, Nature’s chief rival and an equally prestigious journal.

But Science magazine, apparently, was just as aloof. "We sent the paper to Science and they just bumped it," Taubenberger said. Why? Perhaps the scientists looking at the paper questioned the group from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. "It gave the flu community a shock to think that a non-flu person was working on this flu project," Taubenberger speculates. "In the flu community, people may not have heard of us." Only after some senior scientists intervened on Taubenberger’s behalf was his paper sent out for review. Then, he said, the reviewers were enthusiastic about the paper and it was accepted for publication. But Taubenberger was shaken by the experience. "It scared the hell out of us," he said. "I thought it would never get published." After all, he adds, he had no experience with high-profile science and he just assumed that if he did something really important, major journals would jump at the chance to publish it....

But Taubenberger was unaware of the games journals and reviewers—who sometimes are ignorant, sometimes are jealous, sometimes have undisclosed conflicts of interest—can play.

This story still amazes me. If the these academic oligarchs are willing to throw away an opportunity to prepare for the greatest immediate threat facing humanity, simply because the researcher is not an ordained expert on the topic, they are clearly willing to risk anything to preserve their control over new information.

Unschooling for adults

One of the problems with traditional schooling is that you are so often presented with a single authoritative opinion, the sole 'expert' viewpoint which you fully accept if you want to get good grades. In history class, events which actually have varying interpretations are presented as if there is a big book of Historical Facts someplace and they're simply passing along the data. In English class, you get a standard interpretation of each classical work. In science class, the material is presented as if it's a dead language, fixed and no longer changing, totally devoid of debate. But, to take just one example, Stephen J. Gould thought we should divide living things into three kingdoms, not five, with two devoted to bacteria and the third containing everything else. They aren't likely to mention this when launching into weeks of binomial taxonomy.

You grow up this way, and then you get to college, where ostensibly you have discussions and debates and disagreements. But by then you are trained to hunt down that sole 'expert' opinion, and your classmates are looking for the same thing. I had professors who sought dissenting voices, but in vain. We were students who had done well in school and figured out how to get our A's, and we weren't about to change tactics. We inevitably found ourselves convinced by current academic thought, found ourselves parroting the authoritative opinion on our exams.

One of my favorite movies is Good Will Hunting, partly because of the scene in the bar when Will takes a snooty ivy league undergrad to task, accusing him of lifting his ideas from this or that book or scholar, and predicting what he will think next year and the year after that. A graduate student newspaper I read at the time gave it a horrible review, ranting about how anti-intellectual it was. But it wasn't that at all, it was merely anti-academia and in favor of independent learning and thought. To call it anti-intellectual is to claim that there is no intellect outside the most revered universities.

When I had just finished grad school, I thought there was usually a right answer to any question, and that the liberal academic community probably knew what it was. Since then, I've been getting unschooled, which is to say, I started questioning the expert opinions, and tried to do my own research. Nowadays common wisdom looks to me like it's pretty frequently wrong. A low-fat or no-fat diet is best? Well, not exactly.... Beer and wine are bad for you? For the vast majority of people, that's flat wrong. We had no advance warning of 9/11? Totally false. We have public schools to eliminate the class system and promote egalitarianism? Ha!

A lot of adults will believe an academic researcher or a doctor quite blindly, if they seem to possess the right credentials. No doubt their kids believe their textbooks and teachers just as blindly. They say unschooling becomes a lifestyle, and that may be partly because you get used to cutting out the middle man and finding information on your own, and you can't do that for very long without running into a topic where you disagree with conventional wisdom. And once you find one place where it seems the authorities have tried to pull the wool over your eyes, you can't ever go back to your trusting ways. For my family, one aspect of unschooling is summarized by the old hippie mantra, Question Authority. In that sense, I was an unschooler before I even had kids.

On vacation...

My husband is on vacation right now, and we've been visiting relatives and having relatives over to visit. Bear with me for another week and I should be posting more regularly again!