Tag Archives: education

Pork Chops, Electric Shock and PSSA

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Let’s just say that I am developing a simple experiment. I want to find out which one of my kids that my dog likes best. Here’s the experiment: both of my girls stand 20 feet away from the Fletcher, the dog. They aren’t aloud to call him, they are just aloud to stand there and see which one he comes first. Pretty simple and probably unscientific but it will work to prove my point. Would anyone out there say that my experiment was flawed if I put a pork chop in one of the girl’s pocket? Adding an unrelated incentive would make my entire experiment invalid. Is that what your saying?

OK, then, let me change my experiment. This time, both girls standing 20 feet away only in front of one of the girls is standing outside of my invisible fence – you know, the kind that shocks the dog when he tries to run through it. What? You don’t think I’m validly determining which girl the dog likes best. I can’t believe that!

They do it on the PSSA! Rewarding schools for improving performance as well as punishing school districts who aren’t successful is the same experiment. If the test is to determine what students know and are able to do, don’t positive and negative incentives based on scores invalidate the results? If I’m handing out five dollar bills to every student who scores proficient or if I ‘m closing schools that don’t meet minimum standards am I not putting pork chops in some pockets and using electric shock on the others?

What happens is that the most important thing becomes the test. It doesn’t matter how we got there as long as the scores are there. All actions then are determined and justified by the test. The ends justify the means. And the means usually include cutting time on other academic subjects and can extend all the way to removing administrators.

Not much of a valid test environment.

Keep Your Art Out of My Science

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A couple of decades ago while earning my bachelor’s degree in education I recall a professor asking whether we thought that teaching was an art or a science. At that time it was a pretty good debate for a bunch of 19 and 20 year-olds.

Whether we like it or not, there really no longer is a debate about how teachers are expected to teach. Art is no longer appreciated or rewarded. Science – data, pre-made assessments, canned lessons and are I say teaching to the test – is the expectation. There really is no time or necessity to be creative when there a finite number of objectives to accomplish. Sure, you can feel free to address those standards in any way you like! Or can you?The list of expectations for teaching behavior from lesson planning to classroom management to instructional delivery to professional behavior have been spelled out in detail. This is what great teaching looks like!

You understand in order to make the expense of public education justifiable, it has to be boiled down to a number. A number that Joe Average Citizen can comprehend. In order to get to a number you have to have a measurable product. In order to have a measurable product you have to have a concrete tool with which to measure. You can;t have a lot of loose ends that aren’t part of the accepted equation. Too messy.

Teachers in turn feel the pressure to reach some agreed upon number from the ivory tower and do exactly that. Believe me, it is hard to distinguish the standardized testing scores of students taught by teachers who teach straight out of the book and teachers who spend hundreds of hours planning and tweaking lessons. It’s crap.

It’s crap because the test doesn’t measure heart, caring, passion. It doesn’t measure wiped noses and concerned phone calls. There isn’t a tool that can tell Joe Average how many tears are shed over the frustration of language poor and money poor families or the miles of exercise that it takes to relieve the stress of unsupportive parents and less supportive agencies.

That my friends is science. Specific, Measurable, Trackable. Rows of students who might as well be bolting together widgets and sending them down the line.

The problem is that because we don’t reward artistry in our education system, our teachers don’t know how to encourage artistry in their classrooms. When we tell teachers that their jobs depend on making the score, the consciously or subconsciously project those fears onto their students. “No, I can;t let you explore how we came to use standard units instead of metric units, that will take too much time and we have to get to fractions before the PSSA. You just need to know that they are different.”

This is in my estimation the core of the problem in education. The rule followers prevail and the rule challengers fail. From kindergarten through to college, the students who can regurgitate some information in paper and pencil are bound for greatness. The artists will struggle because we can;t quantify what they are capable of. There are many examples of creators who were “poor” students in the eyes of their teachers but went on to do great things. These are the resilient artists. Those that rose above the square peg problem to find a square hole.

Our concern needs to be with the artists who aren’t resilient. The square pegs who, if they are lucky enough, will be able to balance themselves on top of the round hole – stuck in far enough to stay – and hide their artiness in the name of societal norms. And for those who aren’t crafty enough to fake it or resilient enough to overcome, what will become of them? 

Quantifying Quality

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One of the things that I very often do to find inspiration is to read. I’m kind of a nerd when it comes to reading because about 99% of what I read is non-fiction. I take some grief about this from the few people who know this about me. It is deeply imbedded in my personality.

My most recent inspiration came from reading The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. Silver’s expertise is in the area of prognostication. More so in using Bayesian statistics to draw conclusions about probabilities of future events. For example, he correctly predicted 49 of 50 states in the 2008 presidential election and all 50 states in 2012.

Bayesian statistics utilize a sometimes subjective prior probability to make a prediction about the probability of a future event. For example, the number and strength of past earthquakes increase the probability of future, stronger earthquakes.

The reason for my post, as I normally right about education, is whether we can use Bayesian statistics to determine whether the new Framework for Teaching, developed by Charlotte Danielson and adopted by Pennsylvania as it’s new evaluation tool, can predict the number of ineffective teachers in a school.

The Danielson model, by her own admission was developed to provide teachers a framework through which to improve their teaching. Therefore, what we probably want to predict is how likely are teachers to improve by utilizing the Framework.

Another question to answer, and Silver has eluded to his desire to attempt it, is whether any subjective measure can really quantitatively measure the effectiveness of a teacher. In a reddit IAmA, he stated, “There are certainly cases where objective measures applied badly is worse than not applying them at all, and education may well be one of them.” He said this in regard to a question about using test scores to rate teacher effectiveness.

In Pennsylvania, teachers and administrators will be rated on a combination of both: standardized test scores and the Danielson Framework for Teaching. One concrete measure that historically has been shown to be determined more by location than by quality teaching and one qualitative, formative measure that will be applied quantitatively.

I know it’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic but the argument continually needs to be made that education is more qualitative; more art and less quantitative; less science.

Anchored to the Core

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The Common Core Standards, as I have said before, whether here or elsewhere, most definitely will increase the rigor of education throughout the United States.  I have no doubt about that.  They will push academic expectations possibly passed what is developmentally appropriate.

But that standard of achievement has been broken for decades.  When I was in kindergarten 40 years ago I recall only a handful of students who could read by the end of the year.  Now the expectation is that students will be reading at least a few words when they enter K.  If they can’t they are already behind.  Who determined the developmental appropriateness of that giant leap?  I don’t know but kindergarten parents have risen to that challenge.

Or have they?  In 1972 and for at least a couple decades after that, the starting age for beginners was five by the end of January.  Wow!  You could still be four in many places until after Christmas and still be in school.  Now the standard in most states is September 1 or the first day of school. That’s up to five months difference.  In addition, and possibly thanks to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, parents of means very well may keep there children out of school for a year if they are born in the spring or summer months.  Read Gladwell for an explanation.  I reiterate, people of means.  People on the other end of the spectrum of affluence may not have the luxury of keeping there children at home for another year.  Child care is expensive.  That puts our poor students that I spoke of last week at an even bigger disadvantage of possibly 16 months.

Now back to the point.  When the common core is fully in place the expectations of proficiency in kindergarten will be heightened once again.  Without regards to where you came from, what you already know, how many words you have heard in your short life, what experiences you carry into the classroom, or the education level of your mother. And every year we will be pushing further and further past the current expectations.   Again without regard to any of the above plus identified learning disabilities, capacity for learning, or mental health issues.

If all of that isn’t enough.  We are going to do it all SIMULTANEOUSLY! By that I mean it won’t be scaffolded through the grades from K-6 with a possibility of seven years to advance through the levels. Every grade will be responsible for meeting proficiency on grade level Common Core standards in 2014.

Its hard for me to give an example based on the standards because you would have to be familiar with both the Common Core Standards and the Pennsylvania Academics Standards to know exactly where the gaps are.  I can give you an analogy though:

Your school district is required to write a novel by the end of the year.  Your school district will be evaluated on the quality of the writing in your district’s novel.  Every grade level starting in kindergarten will be responsible for one chapter.  Every school district in the state will have a thirteen chapter book.  Sounds like an awesome project!  Problem is, everyone has to write at the same time.  Oh, yeah, we’ll give you some context.  Let’s say the story is about Little Red Riding Hood.  That’s fair.  Now write.  No, sixth grade, you can’t know where fifth grade left off!  Fifth grade didn’t know the content that fourth grade produced.  And only the student and teacher’s in the kindergarten classes know where the story began.

But the Core has become the Anchor

Epilogue: Rockin’ the Suburbs

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Last week I blogged a little about PSSA scores and the false impression that we are testing children when a great deal of what is attributed to “good teaching” can be equally attributed to demographics.  Remember that the rich, suburban schools near large cities in Pennsylvania do very well on the PSSA and the poor, urban schools do extremely poor.  These results are independent of any connection to the percentage of minorities in the school district.  School districts with a relatively high percentage of minorities do just as well as school districts with a minimal percentage of minorities.

So why do suburban school districts do so well?

My theory:  When school districts began to be rated as poor or low achieving, people of means left the city in droves to schools that were already doing well.  The schools in the suburbs.  The shift in affluence from the cities to the suburbs meant that the city school went from below average to dismal and the schools in the suburbs went from above average to pretty near phenomenal.  The highly educated who worked in the cities felt it oput their children at a disadvantage to have them schooled there.

But why does richer equal smarter?

I don’t necessarily think that it does.  What affluence does provide though is experiences.  Experiences at a young age put beginners at a great advantage over students whose experiences are limited.  Students who have been to the zoo, the museum, even a ball game have more experiences than students that never get off their street. That early advantage builds through the primary grades as students of means continue to have experience rich lives. That’s not even mentioning the next level of students who have been to Disney World, Yellowstone or even Mexico.  Think of the experiences that those students take for granted that a student who lives in a 500 square foot apartment never has.

Another factor, and I think the biggest implement to achievement in the early years, is language poor homes.  Vocabulary is the key to all learning.  People of means go to college.  People of tremendous means go to college even if they aren’t smart enough. Whether you earned it or not you were exposed to an enormous new vocabulary and you use that vocabulary in the home.  Even though developmentally children may not know what those words mean, they have been exposed to them.  Exposure puts them one step in front of the child with uneducated or undereducated parents.

One more because I like things in threes:  If you are affluent and have gone to college chances are you work a 9 to 5 job.  Nine to 5 parents are home.  Parents who are home have the opportunity to spend more time with their children. Exposing them to more experiences, more language and reading.  Reading to your children is important but you have to be home to read.

In this whole post, I’m not saying it’s impossible to be a high achiever if you come from a poor, language poor, experientially vapid home.  What I am saying is that it takes work.  Keep in mind that if you are 6 months behind your peers in kindergarten you will have to make 10 months worth of growth in 9 months every year until the end of fifth grade to catch up.  That is unlikely but not impossible.  Students rise above their circumstances all the time.  Those are the students who should be applauded at graduation.  The students who made a 2.0 under the toughest of conditions not the one’s who made a 4.2 with a silver spoon hanging out of their mouths. (Sorry, lost my focus there)

My point is, it’s a snowball effect.  Your school is deemed low-achieving by a single test, if your school is low achieving the people who can move out will, the people who move out will take with them strong experiences and rich vocabulary, with the loss of your high achieving and average students your schools scores will continue to decline.

Can Money Buy Proficiency?

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A week or so ago I published a blog post boldly stating that you could probably sort districts by their aid ratio from high to low and get a pretty accurate projection of how their PSSA reading and Math scores would look.   One of my loyal readers, Rogue Anthropologist, inquired about whether any such research was available.  Being interested in statistics and more so probabilities, I set out to determine how accurate my blurted out hypothesis had been.

What I found was not an exact, one to one correspondence but it is pretty telling. Using 2012 PSSA scores in reading and Math and district aid ratios (AR) for 2012 I was able to get a pretty good picture of district scores in relation to the economic status of the community.  I do want to go on record as saying this isn’t a statistical analysis.  It is a collection of facts based on the data.  I also want to clarify that when I talk about making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) I am talking about what we call in education “making the number.”  In other words I did not take into account whether districts made AYP using confidence interval, Safe Harbor, Growth Model or a combination of any of the above.  I simply used 78% for math and 81% in reading – “the numbers.”  Also, I will note that I used only district totals not individual schools.  For example, Central Dauphin School District is lumped together although it is made up of many different schools including two high schools.  As well, the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh school systems were grouped as one district.

I took all of the school districts in the state and order them from lowest AR (.1500) to the highest (.8814).  I then divided the entire lot into quartiles.  There are 500 school districts in the state of Pennsylvania.  I eliminated one, Bryn Athyn, because they don’t actually educate any students in their district.  Look it up!  It’s pretty interesting.  So, of the 499, since I was looking primarily at the top and bottom quartiles, there were 249 in the middle two quartiles and 125 in the top and bottom.

In the area of Math statewide 62% of the school districts made AYP.  That is important to know as a yardstick for the rest of the data.  School districts in the top quartile according to their AR made AYP 90% of the time.  Conversely, schools in the bottom quartile only made AYP 26% of the time.  That means that a rich school district is about three and a half times more likely to make AYP than a poor one.  To take it a step further, the schools in the top two quartiles – I gave them number 250 – made AYP 80% of the time while the schools in the bottom half made AYP only 42% of the time.

On the Reading PSSA only 28% of the school districts statewide made “the number.”  That seems to have really skewed the numbers based on AR.  In reading only 2% of the schools in the bottom quartile made AYP.  Of the top quartile school districts 70% made AYP.  Some of this in my professional opinion can be attributed to poor households being more apt to be language-poor and those students tend to come to school with fewer background experiences.  When you look at this information as a 50/50 split, the bottom half of school districts only made AYP 8% of the time and the top half made AYP 48% of the time.

There are of course exceptions to every rule.  Windber Area School District and Cambria Heights School District made AYP in both subjects despite ARs of .7324 and .7241 respectively.  Inversely, 14 school districts did not make AYP in either subject even though their ARs ranked in the top quartile.  Pequea Valley School District had the lowest AR of any school not to make either number; .2554.

In addition to economic indicators, I was also interested in determining other factors rather than the quality of teaching that may determine performance on the PSSA.  Research has been done about how the education of the mother impacts achievement.  When I look at that statistic I tend to think that it leads back to the affluence of the family.  Students in privileged circumstances would more likely have two highly educated parents than students living in poverty.

One thought that I have heard, and this is probably do to the poor performance of Pennsylvania’s urban areas, is that the percentage of minorities in a district has an impact on achievement and PSSA. The data on the percentage of minorities in a district is interesting but not very conclusive.  In the area of Math school district that have 10% or greater minorities were proficient 50% of the time (remember that the entire state only had an AYP rate of 62%).  On the opposite end, only 57% of the schools with 2.5% or fewer minorities achieved the 78% threshold.  In Reading the discrepancy is greater but weighted towards the districts with a higher number of minorities, with 33% of school districts with 10% or more minorities making the 81% necessary for AYP and the school districts with 2.5% or fewer minorities making AYP only 13% of the time.  Bear in mind that statewide only 28% of school districts made AYP in the area of Reading.

At the behest of my superintendent I also looked at scores based on the size of the school district.  This is a tough measure when used for measuring the entire district.  The reason being is that the statistic does not take into account the size of individual schools.  For instance the Pittsburgh Public School System, the second largest in the state, has nine high schools to serve 6000 students and the School District of Philadelphia, the largest school district in the state, has 55 high schools to serve roughly 38,000 students.  With those kinds of numbers it is possible to have some high school s doing very well and some high schools doing very poorly.  Anyway, here’s what the number say:  When broken down into quartiles, the top quartile – the largest schools – were proficient 45% of the time in Reading and 71% of the time in Math.  Thirteen percent of schools in the fourth quartile were proficient in Reading and 50% in Math; much to the chagrin of my superintendent.  I’ll have some good news though for him as our district broke many of the rules.

At this point it looks like rich, white – but not too white, large schools have a decided advantage in my personal; race to the top.  Let’s look a little closer though.  Where exactly are the schools that are making it and does that have any impact on their goal of Proficiency?  Well, I’m glad you asked.  There might just be a link.

The National Center for Educational Statistics breaks down districts into categories based on where they are located, how close they are located to a city and the size of the city within the nearest proximity.  Following is the data that I collected on those categories:

  Example Number #Proficient-R %Proficient-R #Proficient-M %Proficient-M
Small City Reading 13 2 15 3 23
Mid-sized City Erie 2 0 0 0 0
Large City Pittsburgh 2 0 0 0 0
All City   17 2 12 3 19
             
Suburb of large city McKeesport 165 78 47 107 66
Suburb of mid-size city Harbor Creek 21 8 38 18 86
Suburb of small city Pottstown 19 12 63 7 37
All Suburb   205 98 48 132 64
             
Distant Town Huntingdon 36 0 0 11 42
Fringe Town Brownsville 74 16 22 47 50
Remote Town Dubois Area 10 1 10 6 60
All Towns   120 17 15 64 58
             
Distant Rural Twin Valley 85 9 11 47 55
Fringe Rural Yough 77 19 25 48 62
Remote Rural Galeton 12 0 0 5 42
All Rural   174 28 16 100 57

As you can see from the data, it is definitely a benefit to live in a suburb especially the suburb of a large or mid-size city.  Those two categories along with the All Suburb categories were the only categories to have a higher percentage of district proficient than the state averages listed previously.  The worst place to live and therefore go to school is obviously in the city with the lowest percentages of all groups.For more information on what each of these categories mean see the NCES website.

With a little dime store analysis you can determine why the suburbs do so well.  Or at least generate an additional hypothesis.

For the conclusion of my hypothesis, without formal statistical analyses, I would say that I was pretty close to accurate.  More affluent school districts are almost three and half times more probable to be proficient on the Math PSSA than their poorer counterparts and more than 35 times more probable to be proficient on the Reading PSSA.  Put another way:  if you live in the top quarter of the wealthiest district in the state your child’s school will have a 9 in 10 probability of being proficient in Math and a 7 in 10 probability of being proficient in Reading.  In opposition, districts that comprise the poorest quarter of all Pennsylvania districts will have a 1 in 4 probability of being proficient in Math and a 1 in 50 probability of being proficient in Reading.  As AYP expectations go up in 2013, to 91% in Reading and 89% in Math, look for those numbers to change.

False Proxy + False Proxy = Your Life

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Inspiration to write can come from a lot of places. For me it comes quite often from Seth Godin‘s blog and a friend who goads me into connecting his work to education.

Today Mr. Godin blogged about false proxy traps. You can check out his blog for details. In a nutshell a false proxy is when a someone measures a component of something that is difficult to measure in order to justify the entire product. Good example: measuring the quality of a police force by how many people are put in jail. This measure would not take into account that a good police force may limit crime by there mere presence or that they are exemplary at solving problems. Crazy example: measuring the power of the Republican Party by watching Fox News exclusively.

Everyone may not agree but the forced high stakes testing required by NCLB is just such a trap. The idea of the testing program is to determine the quality of a school and its staff. Make no mistake about it. These tests, differently labeled in each state, were never meant to test the knowledge of students. The false proxy comes in when we try to take one test, administer it to thousands of students, and then compare them across a wide breadth of cultures, economies, and immeasurable demographics. My guess is that a district’s aggregate PSSA score can just as accurately determine the median income of the school’s coverage area as it can the success of the school. They could also pretty accurately determine the number of parents who attend parent conferences. The first thought would be easy to prove. Take every school and list them from high to low based on aid ratio (market value/personal income) and then make another list and sort them from low to high on district average PSSA score. I’d be willing to bet there is a high degree of comparability. It’s all public knowledge; give it a whirl!

So, I think we have shown pretty accurately that the PSSA is a false proxy for determining the quality of a school. Don’t get me wrong; some teacher’s should find a new career path. But I can compare scores of teacher’s that I work with who have abilities that are across the board in terms of quality instruction and the one’s that have limited skills have students who do just as well as the distinguished teacher’s students.

Second false proxy: The new Pennsylvania teacher evaluation model. This is even simpler. Charlotte Danielson developed this model to assist in improving the quality of teaching. Never, and the company developing the evaluation tool for Pennsylvania has admitted this, did she intend for the rubric to be diminished to a number. Statistically speaking, you can’t take a measure that is qualitative and quantify it. That is, however, what the Pennsylvania Department of Education intends to do. A tool built to determine the strengths and weaknesses of a teacher and guide him or her to being a distinguished educator will be used to measure his or her effectiveness.

Not only will it water all of this high quality information down to a single number but that number will count as 50% of a teacher’s – and eventually an administrator’s – annual evaluation. Throw in that another 15-30% of the annual evaluation will be determined by PSSA scores and you have a conglomeration of false proxies and statistical fallacies. Goog luck! Two years of low scores and poor observations or probably two years of average observations and average PSSA scores and you may be looking for a job – and me too!

 

Question this Answer

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This is a response to a post by Jan Simson over at Inspiration Avenue.  His question, “how would you make the education system better?” is something that I have written about in a roundabout way over the last several months.  

I’ll start my restating that I think that what education needs is a reinvention.  Starting from a vacuum and determining the best way to teach kids.  When I think about this now I think about the times in our lives when we learn things without a teacher.  Take for instance walking.  Does anyone really ever teach us to walk or do we just eventually walk?  Sure there are encouraging words and opportunities to walk provided.  We reached out fora hand, leg or table for stability.  Someone buys us a decent pair of shoes to make sure that those first few steps go smoothly and if we’re lucky, someone sets us down on a nice, soft surface so that falling doesn’t hurt so much.  No one ever says, “Okay, in today’s lesson we are going to talk about feet.  Feet are your primary means of transportation.  Once we learn about feet we will go on to standard PK.1.2 and you will begin to understand how those feet attach to legs.” In there was definitely no side trip to the history of shoes and footwear around the world.

What if we took those same ideas and put them into practice in education?  Give students opportunities to learn about what interests them and encourage them along the way.  Provide students with the resources that they need to be successful in their endeavors.  And provide the support that they need along the way.

The truth is that in the 21st century there is no way that we will be able to teach all of the content that currently exists.  Our jobs must be to teach students how to access the content, think critically about what they find and to solve the problems that they encounter along the way. The fact is that the jobs that we believe we are preparing our students for won’t even exist in 10, 15 or 20 years.  The skills of thinking critically and solving problems will be necessary in any future job. The character traits of courage and perseverance won’t hurt either.

If I had to sum it up in a bulleted list:

  • Teach students to be problem solvers.  Really that’s why we learn to walk. To solve the problem of it taking so long to get to what we want.
  • Encourage students along the way.
  • Teach students to be critical thinkers.
  • Encourage them to take chances.
  • Provide them with the tools that they need to access content.

 

The Low Hanging Fruit of Education

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This year the elementary school that I lead made adequate yearly progress in every category. I’m not bragging; just stating a fact. In fact, our school has made adequate yearly progress every year. That sounds like great news, headline grabbing stuff in a small town. Unfortunately, the way the system works, that is not necessarily great news.

Next year we will have to be 89% proficient in Math and 91% proficient in Reading. We are a very small school. In the grade span that we are responsible for, 3-5, we will test approximately 180 students. That means that no more than 18 students can be basic or below basic in Math and 16 in Reading (The state doesn’t round up)

Unfortunately the low hanging fruit has been picked. All of those things that don’t cost money but suck all of the knowledge out of students. You know them because your school has done them: increase instructional time, align to standards, eliminate the “unnecessary” subjects, teach to the test. Done!

In order to harvest the higher fruit everyone needs more resources. Even a picker needs a ladder. To really get to those five or six students that are on the fringe we need to extend the day, offer after school resources to the economically disadvantaged, and engage more parents in the educational lives of their children. Luckily we’re tall and we probably only need a step stool. But even a step stool costs money. If you read the papers you know there ain’t none of that.

Throw in a complete retooling of the standards that will be instituted next testing cycle; which by the way have not been approved by PA yet; and you have an equation that can’t possibly balance. Keep in mind that while the common core standards are indeed a step in the right direction, somehow it will be necessary to increase the rigor in third grade to the extent that one year can replace the change in rigor designed to be achieved in four years. Never mind the impact on the sixth grade curriculum that needs to make up for 7 years of changes in rigor in less than 180 days.

The projections are that over 80% of the schools in Pennsylvania will not make adequate yearly progress in 2013. Those were the projections before schools lost funding and the final transition to common core was approved. If the projection for 2013 is 80% the projection for 2014 must be close to 90%.

Let me run this idea past you. In Pennsylvania is education the low hanging fruit of the commonwealth? Is it just simple to set up schools to fail under the guise of keeping taxes low? Is their a benefit to the citizenry in the privatization of K-12 schools? No ladder needed! Just hanging out there like Tom Corbett’s personal piñata.

But, that’s another blog post all together. Just let me say this though, those guys from Commonwealth Connections Academy with their matching backpacks and polo shirts (paid for with your tax dollars) seemed to be sleeping significantly better than most administrators that I know!

Reinventing the Wheel

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Last week I wrote about inventing in a vacuum and why it is sometimes important to improve based on the nothingness rather than the knowledge that you have.  That led me to one thought:  What about the impression that we should not “Reinvent the Wheel.”

“Good point,” I commend myself.

But not everything is a wheel.  The wheel is quite possibly beyond the capacity for improvement.  You can’t make it rounder.  There are things that it makes no sense to reinvent.  They have already been perfected; most likely in their first incarnation.  Even in a vacuum you couldn’t come up with a better design.

If some things were never reinvented they wouldn’t exist.  The first incarnation of the light bulb was an utter failure.  Some things are reinvented to keep up with demands.   The first incarnation of every form of transportation would not survive modernity.

I can’t think of many “wheels” in education.  Maybe the alphabet?  I don’t think there is a better order or if a different order makes it better.  But, given all the sounds in the English language and a vacuous state in which to create a new alphabet, surely you could come up with something better or at least different.

My point is in education as well as in the rest of the world we need to be able to analyze the parts of the whole and determine what needs reinvented and what is already beyond improvement.  Not only that but what things need to be created out of emptiness.

I don’t think we need a twist off cap on a wheel.