Category: Teaching, Learning, and Education

I’ve just finished reading a little book — 896 pages — that contains an absolutely scathing if unintentional send-up of school reform. In it, the government decides that the headmaster of the state school is teaching subversion, and decides to make rules which will bring it in line with governmental expectations. One of these new rules allows the government to appoint suitable candidates to faculty vacancies, and which is how a government approved teacher came to be teaching a government approved age appropriate syllabus. Unfortunately, students were only allowed to read about the topic, rather than practice any of the techniques discussed. Imagine learning to play baseball by reading a book, because after all someone might get hurt; now you’ve got the idea. Oh, and the final exam was to be a lab practical. Before the year was half gone, many changes had occurred. Only clubs and teams that had government approval were allowed. A teacher had been fired. A newspaper published by one student’s father had been banned. Oh, and spring semester only got worse.

Of course, since all of this is the secondary plot, you won’t see it in the review over at Amazon.

And this brings me to the latest news that a coalition of 13 Governors have decided that it is important to bring our high schools up to the high standards that employers and colleges expect. These Governors have called the system broken. They are being urged on by the world’s richest man, former CEO of a Dow Component company that employs 57,000 people. Of course, Bill Gates and his family have for some years been deeply interested in improving the quality of education in the United States. To say that “For decades, our education system has performed exactly as expected: it has identified the top quarter of students and prepared them to serve as leaders in government and business, trained another quarter for jobs requiring skilled labor, and left half of all students relatively unskilled,” is absolutely jaw-droppingly scathing.

Don’t forget, Mr. Gates is concerned both as an American and a major employer who provides thousands of good paying, high-tech jobs.

So these Governors, a bipartisan group, have agreed that there are problems: not enough kids are graduating high school; there is a discrepancy between the performance of rich/poor and white/minority kids; the kids who do actually graduate high school often do not have necessary skills and knowledge. They have further agreed to tackle these problems: they want schools be accountable; they want the curriculum to be tougher (I am unsure how this is supposed to improve the graduation rate); they want “every child to graduate high school with a meaningful diploma in their hands”; they want that diploma to be harder to get (ditto); they want “to match their graduation standards with the expectations of employers and colleges”; they want to bring state standards and testing in line with employer expectations; they want to make all high school students take and pass college preparatory coursework (double ditto).

Allow me to start by saying that yes, we need high school standards, and they need to be good ones. Employers and colleges need to know that a person with a high school diploma knows and can do certain things. That does not mean that every child needs a college preparatory curriculum. I have never once been asked by an employer to recite the first 18 lines of Canterbury Tales, calculate the inverse of a matrix, diagram a Latin sentence, find the force applied to a major league fast ball, explain the logical fallacy of Avis’s “We Try Harder” campaign, or most of the other things I learned to do in college prep classes.

Not everybody wants to go to college. Not everybody needs college. There, I have spoken the heresy.

When Bill Gates implies that American schools fail by teaching half of the students neither sufficient academics for college nor sufficient skills for a trade, he is not saying everybody should go to college. Indeed, the man in a college drop-out himself. There are plenty of jobs in the United States that do not need college education, but rather good old fashioned rational thought, problem solving, math, and the ability to read. I am not talking about sacking groceries. Maybe we can outsource computer programming, but the wiring and plumbing of your house will have to be built and repaired where it is. There are good paying jobs in the building trades. Likewise, food service is a field which runs much deeper than “do you want fries with that.” Nor are these the only places where college degrees don’t matter.

If our aim is truly to prepare young people for life beyond high school, then we must consider vocational education to be part of the solution. If we need multiple grades of high school diploma to accommodate that, so be it.

If you are a supervisor, manager, or any other businessperson who hires and directs others, you may already know what follows. If not, I am about to scare you.

American students, by age 15, have fallen behind their peers in many countries. In fact, only 10% are considered to fall in the top two most proficient groups, despite the fact that 72% say they get good grades in math. We aren’t talking about esoteric problems involving mathematical minutia, either; the test the students were given “assesses the abilities of 15-year-old students from 41 countries to apply what they have learned in school to real-life problems.” Problems much like those adults face on the job and in their lives. A calculator won’t help with these problems unless you know what to calculate.

One expert excuses the poor performance of American teenagers by pointing out that our classes focus on “analytical and theoretical” issues, saying “You could have American kids knowing more math, it’s just that they may test lower than other countries because their learning is not geared toward practical application.” Call me old fashioned, but practical application of math is what most adults will do when they balance their checkbook. I think little of “analysis” that does not result in accurate “application.” This explanation is akin to saying we shouldn’t be expected to read newspapers, but we studied Shakespeare in High School!

Apparently, there is no great secret for how to prepare students to do well on this type of test. Throwing money at schools was not the answer, instead the critical factors were “a good relationship between students and teachers, pupils eager to learn, an environment in which mathematics classes do not provoke anxiety, and constructive rules to enforce discipline.”

Let me say that again: it is well known how to teach math to students, yet American students are not learning.

In general, effective teaching methods are no great secret, just sometimes ignored, derided as the stuffy, boring old way things used to be done. It is as true for reading or any other subject as it is for math.

And, no surprise, we have a crisis of language skills in the United States too. We are a nation that can’t tell the difference between s and ‘s, that can’t put together a coherent memo, that can’t read instruction manuals. Even some college educated professionals have problems when it comes to written English. The addition of e-mail to the workplace has made this all the more obvious to employers.

Some people are under the delusion that public education does not effect them. They think that because their kids are grown up, or they have no kids, that schools are none of their business. The truth of the matter is that unless you live in a cave, every day you interact with and depend upon people who were educated in public schools. Your doctor, lawyer, hairdresser, landscaper, the cashier at the grocery store, the FedEx delivery guy, all very likely went to public schools. You even depend on public schools to teach enough reading that the guy in the next car understands “No Left Turn” and doesn’t crash into you.

The history and usage of the word “dude” is probably more interesting than the rules of grammar, punctuation, and mathematics. All things considered, I’d rather have an employee who understands how to solve everyday problems using math to one who understands the proper use of the term “Dude.”

It’s October. Do you know where the paperwork for the latest school fundraiser is?

School fundraising has become big, big business. In a world where you almost can’t go a week without hearing about some cash-strapped school somewhere, it seems like a no-brainer to sell the community something of “value” and make money that is sorely needed. And of course there’s that captive work force of young people. The result is that if there is a school in your neighborhood, there is a fundraiser in your neighborhood.

I don’t really mind short fundraising events with clearly defined goals. A bake sale to raise money for kids who can’t afford to go on the class trip? I’m there! I don’t have a problem with the annual Book Fair either: not only do kids get an opportunity to own actual books they might read, but the school library gets money for — you guessed it — books! Actual educational materials! Radical thought! But it seems like every year there are more fundraisers with more nebulous goals and unstated purposes. Such events are counterproductive to the educational environment, and often to the needs of the community.

Fundraisers waste valuable classroom time. Every minute a teacher spends collecting order forms, answering questions about the fundraiser, or dealing with money from the fundraiser represents time he or she could be spending teaching or dealing with other classroom issues. Furthermore, any time a student spends listening to a company representative talk about a fundraiser, whether that time is in the classroom or (worse yet) in an assembly, is time that student is not reading, writing, doing math, working on a science experiment, or anything else that might educate or enrich. Fundraisers have never claimed to have any intrinsic educational value of their own.

Fundraising promises can be misleading to schools. Schools are promised a cut of the action, sometimes as high as 50% or even 90% with “no money up front.” Of course that doesn’t include administrative hassles and lost productivity. How much is the Principal’s time worth on an hourly basis? Furthermore, since the fundraising company’s job is to sell fundraising materials, the target projections may find themselves artificially inflated. Chinese math may ensue: “You have 500 students. If each sells $100 worth of product — and who wouldn’t want to sell $100 of our fabulous product — that’s $50,000!” Never discussed are shrinkage or cancelled orders.

Fundraising incentives are often misleading to students. Sell an impossible quantity of the product of the month and get a swell prize. (Administrators, please do not pay any attention to where the money for these prizes comes from!) Of course, all your classmates are your competition. To win the big prize, you clearly have to sell a lot of product not only to everyone you know, but to people you don’t know too. Oh, but wait, every school fundraising site out there specifically has the disclaimer that they don’t encourage unsupervised door-to-door selling. That brings us to….

Fundraising is intrusive to the entire family. There is great pressure to buy the product of the month. Furthermore, many parents feel obligated to take the ordering materials to work, to hit up the friends and relatives for orders, to take the kids on a supervised trip around the neighborhood. More than one parent has thought “How big a check to I have to write to make this go away?”

While fundraising products are always premium priced, they are often of unknown quality. Let’s just take coffee as an example. You know that you can go to the grocery store and buy 12 ounces of coffee grounds for $5, or you can buy the fancy grounds from a big name coffee place for more like $8-12. And that is how fundraiser coffee is priced. But you know what you are getting if you buy Folgers, and that it’s not the same as buying Starbucks or Peets. The only assurance you have that the fundraiser coffee is not utter swill is the word “gourmet” on the catalog. Frankly, the school might get a better deal from a wholesaler: product will be of a known quality, and no middleman gets a cut for providing flashy promotional materials.

Fundraising exacerbates the gap between schools in wealthy neighborhoods and in poor neighborhoods. Think about it. Rich school has no money for new team uniforms? Have a fundraiser, problem solved. Poor school has no money for additional textbooks? A fundraiser has to be absolutely fantastic to do the job. In poor neighborhoods, many families do not have money for gourmet coffee, overpriced wrapping paper, or frozen cookie dough. It isn’t that these people don’t care about their kids education, it’s just that they’ve already given everything they can.

Schools have a lot of things they are worrying about right now. Just for starters, there are the regulatory demands of “No Child Left Behind” and school violence and an official Look Out! notice from the Department of Education and even security issues at schools that happen to be polling places. Fundraising should be the least of their worries.

We are told again and again that the free market does an inherently better job than the government on just about anything that the private sector can legitimately do. This being the case, I am puzzled by charter schools. No, not by the conflicting research on whether public schools do a better job than charter schools (commentaries that disagree here, here, a particularly obnoxious one here, and the best one here, showing that charter schools might be 2-4% better, and commentaries that agree or at least find the data comparable here and here).

No, what has me puzzled is the fact that charter schools seem to be more costly to run than expected. Whether we are talking about $15 Million dollar grants in Minnesota or fundraisers to build facilities in Chicago, more than one person thinks it is time to have a critical look at what charter schools cost. Maybe this kind of questioning is why Edison Schools became a privately held company. Yeah, they’ve got problems.

These foibles are nothing compared to the collapse of a 60 campus charter school system in California. This system closed suddenly in the late summer, leaving parents to scramble finding new schools for children, leaving teachers to scramble for new jobs, leaving student records and other valuable assets to rot in abandoned facilities. Granted, there appears to have been some “misunderstanding” of the law — and I have no patience for businessmen who do not know the laws that pertain to their businesses — but this situation is absurd. This system received about $5000 per student, some systems receive as much as $9000 per student. Nevertheless we are still talking about charter schools going bankrupt, having massive fundraisers, and pulling down multi-million dollar government grants. Is too much money being put in corporate pockets instead of educating students?

That’s a whole lot more than the average per pupil spending of about $7500, let alone what the Cato Institute thinks* private schools cost on average.

Charter schools cost more money, and do not appear to do a statistically significantly better job than public schools. Let’s stop wasting taxpayers’ and parents’ money.

* I have discussed this more in-depth elsewhere. To be brief, the Cato Instutute includes schools that provide partially subsidized education, non-accredited schools, and schools with very low enrollment. This drives average cost down.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Poor Kids Thrive in Charter School. (Here’s a no registration required version, and a related story). This brings to mind a thesis that all we need to do to improve schools in poor neighborhoods is turn them over to private management and let them be charter schools. Free them of government oversight and teachers unions; let the miracle of free markets do the rest. Unfortunately their anecdote does not prove the headline.

The school in question is the Preuss School, run by the University of California at San Diego. Here, 750 specially chosen students from around the area attend a $14 Million facility one more month a year, one more hour a day, and have double-length classes that meet every other day. Parental participation and volunteerism is expected. Evidence of their success is high attendance, high college admissions rates, and high rates of actually taking the SAT. A better title for this essay might be “Select Group of Poor Kids Thrive in One Particular Charter School.”

What they have proven is that the sort of student who will enroll in such a school, and whose parents will support such a decision, are achievers.

Companies that run private and charter schools — companies like Edison and Nobel — do not have $14 Million facilities. Nor can any school district afford to turn every campus into such a facility. Few organizations have the ability to make teachers work more hours. Neither private companies nor average school districts have the backing of major universities and the bottomless pool of Education Majors those universities are training. This model is replicable, but absolutely cannot be made universal.

Speaking of what is best for the children, what was the American Academy of Pediatrics thinking when they published a report suggesting a wait and see attitude for kids’ ear infections? Waiting a week might be reasonable, but “For children who are not at risk for speech, language or learning problems, ‘watchful waiting’ for at least three months is recommended instead of treatment.”

Just what every parent wants to do, spend 3 months watching and waiting with a kid whose ears hurt. Besides which, almost by definition a kid who has an earache for 3 months is at risk for speech, language, or learning problems. The strange thing is that the members of the AAP will wonder why parents find this advice unacceptable.

Maybe you read about this here, here, or even here. It is less likely that you have read this press release. The short version of the story is as follows: The Forney Independent School District, just enough East of Dallas to be not quite a suburb, has decided that rather than buy traditional textbooks for the 5th and 6th graders, they will buy notebook computers with the textbooks and 2000 works of literature on them.

The official reasons for this decision include the fact that the District expects to be short about 600 textbooks, and it takes 3 months to order and receive books. Furthermore, the director of this program points out that “A child’s set of textbooks costs $350. If they can get these notebooks down to $500, it gets cost-effective in a hurry.” Of course the students can tell you that $350 is less than $500, and a lot less than the $1350 that each computer will actually cost. Based on a quick check of prices, it seems unlikely that this price includes the content. I sincerely doubt the computerized versions of the textbooks cost less than their paper-based brethren.

IBM for it’s part points out that works of literature — such as the complete works of Shakespeare — that are already on the computer represent physical books the district does not need to purchase. How many of those 2000 works of pre-loaded literature will actually be read anyway? Does anybody really want to read them on their computer? How many of them are remotely age-appropriate? Most American students are not officially exposed to Shakespeare until 8th or 9th grade, but that seems to be beside the point. The party line from IBM and their content partner, Vital Source Technologies, is that computerized is better. After all, it’s indexed, it’s searchable, it’s all in one relatively lightweight box that fits nicely into a knapsack or locker. It’s even ergonomically friendly compared to a student carrying every textbook they use.

Math pop quiz! Which is less money: 600 textbooks times $350 (that’s the price for a complete set of books, despite the fact that they “only” expect to be short 600 individual textbooks), or 459 students times $1350? I bet you could buy a lot of books with the difference between those figures. Congratulations, Texans. This is your tax money at work.

Now that we’ve utterly debunked the idea that somehow this saves money, we can deal with the unintended consequences of this decision. Let’s start with computer literacy. Are the teachers really prepared to use these computers, let alone teach from them? Are they ready to spend the first 10 minutes of each and every class debugging somebody’s computer textbook problem? And is it fair to the other kids in class to waste this time in every class period? I’m sure they’ve got better things to do.

Which brings us to the next problem. How are you going to make sure the kids are reading their textbooks instead of playing games? Don’t tell me these computers have no games on them. One trip home fixes that problem. If these computers are equipped with wireless modems, it doesn’t even take that. In fact, games may be the least of the unauthorized software that ends up on these computers.

Speaking of one trip home, we should consider parental support at home. Are the parents capable of helping the kids use and perhaps troubleshoot the computer? There’s nothing to troubleshoot in a book. Don’t dismiss this problem: computerized textbooks may exacerbate the achievement gap between rich and poor students. How? By making parents less able to help their children.

There is also an obsolescence issue to consider. The school officials in this case claim that paper textbooks can be several years out of date. However, does this really change anything? Experts are not going to decide that the Declaration of Independence wasn’t really signed in 1776, or that a water molecule isn’t really two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. How much of what a 6th grader really needs to know about any given topic is really the topic of heated academic debate? There is still valuable information in a 5 year old textbook. On the other hand, see what you can accomplish with a 5 year old computer. Good luck.

Speaking of 5 year old computers, let’s talk about the environmental impact of this project. Those computers will have to be disposed of someday, and computers aren’t exactly landfill friendly. In addition to added disposal costs, there will be ongoing costs to operate these computers. One light bulb can make a dozen students able to read a standard textbook. However, each of these computers will require its own power.

I haven’t even gotten around to talking about theft and damage. Officials at schools where such programs have been tried say this is rare, but frankly I find that hard to believe. I am more willing to believe that a certain number of parents are just willing to suck up repair and replacement costs.

Finally, what if when fall comes, it turns out the school is short computers? After all, the reason for this purchase was an anticipated textbook shortage. At least you can photocopy pages of a textbook until a book order arrives.

The only person who really stands to benefit from this deal is one IBM salesman.

Unless you have been living in a box, you know there is great consternation over the state of education in the United States. This is despite the decades of reforms and theoretical improvements since 1983’s landmark document, “A Nation At Risk,” which famously stated, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

The latest item in the war on educational mediocrity is the now 2 year old “No Child Left Behind” Act. It is built on two lofty ideals: that all schools can improve, and that all children can succeed. In fact, any public school receiving Title I funds that fails to improve the performance of children in every sub-group, any school that fails to submit test scores for 95% of children in every sub-group, is labeled as failing. Yes, this means that if there is a school with 10 Latino kids and one is sick on test day the school is failing no matter how good it is. That is one of several reasons many at the state level feel NCLB needs new standards. Frankly the two lofty ideals it is built upon are flawed. We don’t like to admit that there are children who cannot succeed, whether it is because of profound mental deficiencies, or because of a home-life that is hostile to the educational system, or because the child simply has no desire to learn. As for improving schools, when the only standard for school performance is “better,” you have the underlying assumption that all schools are failing.

Critics point out that even good schools can improve, and even in good schools there is often a gap between various groups of students. Furthermore, they point out that even good American students lag behind foreign students. This problem is not addressed by simply demanding “better.”

A new report even cites the state of the American educational system as a reason for overseas outsourcing by “failing to provide strong science and math education to students.” The organization publishing the report “called for tech businesses to support math and science education in schools, with donations of both money and time.” They support the idea of educating and inspiring kids by sending scientific professionals out into public schools. Unfortunately, NCLB prevents this. The act requires “highly qualified” teachers in every classroom by Fall of 2005. The government definition of “highly qualified” includes first and foremost having a teaching license, which in most states presupposes having a specialized degree in education. This prevents many “highly qualified” individuals from teaching. Bill Nye cannot teach a science class; Norm Abram cannot teach wood shop; John Williams cannot conduct the high school honor band.

American society, parents, and employers have a reasonable expectation that schools will produce graduates who can take their places in society, who know certain facts, who have skills in areas such as reading and math. Instead of simply demanding “better,” let’s set forth attainable goals and standards. These standards should not be written in private by intellectuals, but with public input from the people who will interact with the graduates of the future.

Here is a start: a high school graduate should be able to read and understand a newspaper, VCR instruction book, or IRS tax form; he or she should be able to use math to balance a checkbook, tabulate an order form, determine whether he/she received correct change, or calculate square footage or yardage of a room; he or she should know enough about American history and government to know how we elect public officials, that Social Security is not a savings plan, and what the Bill of Rights says; he or she should know enough about science to realize that Dihydrogen Monoxide is not a threat, he/she should be familiar with basic facts and generally accepted theories about the world around us, and should be able to determine when something is bogus by comparing claims with reality.

It seems like school and the children who attend them have gotten a lot of attention lately. Everybody agrees that schools are not as good as they could be. Nobody agrees what to do about it.

Schools in this nation took a long time to get where they are now. They will take some years of diligent retooling to become world class. The educational fad of the month club will not suffice, nor will feel-good strategies with no supporting research. This does not mean we should give up on today’s high school students, but rather recognize that today’s incremental improvements will be most visible when today’s kindergarteners are in high school. We will not know for several years whether current reforms work. Some evidence already suggests that Leave No Child Behind is not as effective as it should be.

Schools will improve, and improve dramatically, but not until we as a nation declare that the number one priority of our schools from grade school to grad school is to educate children. That sounds stupidly simple until you understand that if education is the first priority, then athletics and other extracurriculars and even University level research can at best be second.

Some will argue correctly that it is difficult if not impossible to educate children who are worried about where thier next meal is coming from, or whether one parent is getting drunk/high today yet, or getting home without encountering bullies/gangs/drug dealers. As one young woman interviewed on a Detroit news program said, “It’s hard to concentrate on your papers when part of the ceiling is falling on them.” So of course there must be adequate investment in such areas as facilities, referrals to social services, nutritious school lunches, and age appropriate discipline. However, this does not mean turning schools into million dollar nannyvilles.

Studies have shown that although throwing money at schools improves them, beyond a certain point costs outstrip benefits. Some people have suggested that money mismanagement is rampant in some school districts, and thus more money is very likely to mean more waste if not more outright fraud. Waste and fraud do not educate children.

If we have high school students who cannot read a newspaper or an instruction manual, who cannot do enough math to balance a checkbook or figure out how much X they will need for project Y, who do not understand the Bill of Rights or how we elect Presidents and pass laws, then we cannot give that student a diploma. If they have been getting good grades and still do not know basic stuff every high school graduate should be expected to know, that is the fault of the teacher who gave good grades rather than face reality (and possibly angry parents). Students, Parents, Communities, and Employers all have a vested interest in the High School Diploma representing a basic proficiency in these and several other areas.

All this being said, allow me to offer a few ideas on real Educational Reform. First, recognize that testing is an important way to find out where kids are and what if anything they have learned. However, tests do not teach kids anything. All standardized student testing — state, federal, and everything else throughout the year — should take up no more than one school week. Such tests should keep in mind age/grade appropriate standards and skills. Thus, teaching to the test should be replaced with teaching to and exceeding the standards. “Improvement” is not a sufficient goal: this goal assumes that there are no good schools, that every school is by nature deficient. There needs to be a clear, attainable minimum standard, and the understanding that some schools will exceed them. That’s okay. Excellence is good.

Second, all teachers and school administrators should be encouraged to look at each activity and expense and ask “How does this educate children?” Everything, from the morning announcements on the loudspeaker on up to the last extracurricular at the end of the day should be open to scrutiny. Be honest about actual costs in time and money. Entire programs might be labeled “non-educational” and cut, leaving more money for things that do work. In a related vein, consider whether the costs are worth the benefits. Such analysis may well lead some schools to eschew “free” government money because it simply costs too much. Yeah, that may mean that such schools don’t get “their fair share” of tax dollars, paid from within their district. Encourage parents to vote.

Finally, what if I told you there was one simple thing we could do, particularly in our high schools, that would raise comprehension and achievement levels within a year? There would furthermore probably be incremental improvements for about 5 years before leveling off. Test scores would improve not because of coaching or teaching to the test, but rather because the kids would know and understand more. And what if I were to tell you that this same change would have other beneficial effects? This same change has the potential to reduce crime both by and against teenagers, reduce gang activity and drug/alcohol use, reduce truancy rates, and reduce teen pregnancy.

What is this educational miracle, and why aren’t we doing it already? It is the idea of starting High School no earlier than 8:30 or 9:00 AM, and letting classes run until at least 3:00 PM. Researchers agree that teenager’s brains just flatly aren’t fully awake before then. It should be obvious that kids who are not awake cannot perform as well academically. And you have falsely been told that classes must start by 7:30 and be out by 1:30 because of money. The official reason teenagers are let out of school so early is so they can take care of younger siblings they don’t have, and take part time jobs which are increasingly being taken by grown-ups trying to make ends meet, and to facilitate the school bus schedule which can be changed. The real reason is so student athletes have more time on the playing field before dark. That’s right, the performance of every student has been compromised so the jocks don’t have to use light bulbs.

Honestly, I would have thought academics for everyone were more important than sports practice for a chosen elite.

Today, the Department of Education released it’s mammoth report card on the nation’s schools: the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NEAP. From the Washington Post: “Administered to a representative sample of students nationwide, the NAEP tests are widely regarded as the most objective and independent assessment of educational progress. While the congressionally mandated test has been in existence since 1969, this is the first year it has been made compulsory for all 50 states under the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind educational reform measures.”

Reading skills held steady. As for math, the good news is that our students have had solid improvements since 2000, particularly in basic skills. The bad news is that less than a third of the 4th and 8th grade students tested were “proficient” at math.

If you are in a position to hire people who need math skills, this should scare the socks off you.

Needless to say, some states are touting their own scores from this massive document. Some are calling attention to how poor the scores are. Critics call the test flawed inasmuch as students are meeting state criteria but not Federal criteria. And still others point to the fact that the tests were administered to a “representative sample,” not to every student.

The most sensible statement regarding these scores came from middle school teacher and standards writer Betsy Wiens: “Obviously we’re not there yet, but change is not going to be quick. When you change a system, it just takes time.” She is of course correct. It took our schools decades to get where they are today, and it will take years to meaningfully improve them. There is no magic bullet: neither zero-tolerance policies nor school uniforms nor standardized tests nor vouchers nor charter schools nor willy-nilly increases in school expenditures will make kids proficient in reading and math.

We must commit to the idea that schools could be better. We must commit to the idea that getting better means making changes that not everyone will like and that may not be convenient for everyone. We need to commit to abandoning things that do not work, things that do not educate children. We must commit to the fact that learning is more than showing up, that graduation rates have nothing to do with literacy rates. We must commit to the idea that “reform” is more than handing down a set of rules and objectives and then walking away, smug in the trust that such words on paper will magically improve our schools.

We must begin with the fundamental idea that from this day forward, the fundamental purpose of schools, from Grade School to Grad School, will be to educate our children.

Our future depends on it.

Some years ago, I was at a playground when I found an empty glass liquor bottle. Rather than allow it to get broken and maybe hurt some little kid, I picked it up and put it in the trash can. If I had done that as a student at a public school playground I would have faced suspension for “posessing” the liquor bottle.

Today is the height of “back to school” season. Millions of kids begin classes today, joining those who began last week, and getting a head start on those who do not begin until after Labor Day. Today, police officers in a variety of municipalities will take advantage of the newly reinstated school zones to boost the city coffers under the pretext of student safety, never mind the dwindling population of true “walker” students. This afternoon, millions of kids will bring home student/parent handbooks, replete with buzzword–compliant mission statements, dress codes, school lunch policies, school library hours, computer lab use policies, important phone numbers the Principal hopes you will never dial, and of course rules.

Some of these rules will be common sense: don’t hurt fellow students; don’t run in the hallways; don’t take stuff that isn’t yours; don’t damage school property; don’t cheat; if you are in the halls during classes, you’d better have a hall pass or be prepared to explain yourself. Some of them — and these will vary wildly by school — will make sense if you think about them for a few minutes: keep covers on your textbooks so they stay in good condition; no parents dropping in at lunchtime because it’s a big distraction; no apparel advertising or glorifying the use of drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes because it’s not legal for students to be using such substances. Some of them at any given time may be kneejerk reactions to something that has happened in the past: all book bags must be clear; no thong underwear; a list of items considered “gang” apparel and therefore prohibited.

Some or all of these rules may be enforced under a “Zero Tolerance Policy.” This means that if the rule is broken, school officials have no choice but to levy the district presribed punishment. It is most common to apply such a policy to contraband and violence — sometimes including the threat or planning of real or fictional violence. Such policies are popular with schools because they give the illusion of safety and security. It allows schools to hide behind policy by giving staff a set of immutable guidlines that can be applied uniformly by absolutely anybody. It gives parents and the community the false impression that problems will be dealt with in a swift and uniform manner, that certain behaviors do not occur simply because they will not be tolerated. In reality such policies often mask problems, teach distrust of authority, are used as an excuse to get certain students out of the system, result in the cover-up of activities by certain other students, and actively demand that teachers and administrators not think or use common sense.

By all accounts, our school system is in crisis, producing students who do not know things, cannot apply what knowledge they have, cannot solve problems. The very idea that we are now demanding that their teachers suspend rational thought to enforce rules is mind-boggling. If we have adults in our public school system that cannot be trusted to apply rules in a fair manner, the solution is to get rid of them. Tenure or not.

The list of “contraband” makes this kind of policy more strange. Sure, we can all agree that kids shouldn’t bring weapons to school. But these days “weapon” can include a disposable plastic knife, a water pistol, and the chain on a girls purse. And high school students should be on notice not to help anyone move, not even a family member, because should an honest to goodness kitchen knife remain in the vehicle, expulsion in all likelihood will ensue. We can surely all agree that we don’t want little kids hauling around a bunch of medications — surely they should be administered by the school nurse. (Ha ha, the joke is on us. The “nursing shortage” combined with tight school budgets mean the school nurse is going the way of the dodo. If you are lucky, the school secretary knows first aid.) Unfortunately this underestimates the intelligence of young people with chronic conditions. An asthmatic who is having an attack needs his inhaler now, not after a breathless wheezing run to the office. Someone having an acute allergic reaction, or insulin shock, or an epileptic attack should not have to wait on lifesaving medication over a senseless rule. For that matter, common sense treatment of certain over-the-counter medications might be good for school numbers in the high school setting. Don’t you suppose most high school students should be intelligent and mature enough to follow the line of reasoning: “Gee, I have a headache. If I take an ibuprofen pill, I will feel better and be better able to pay attention in class. That might help me learn something.”

The biggest damage such policies do is in the matter of trust. Contrary to the rhetoric of such policies being used in a fair, uniform, unbiased fashion, the same games of favoritism and discrimination are now given respectable clothing. Do you honestly think the high school star football or basketball player has the rules applied in the same fashion as the school outcast? Honestly? I suggest you ask Patrick Dennehy’s teammates if that is true. Furthermore, the student who thinks he is doing a good thing by pointing out some serious issue often finds that he unleashes a frenzy of suspensions and expulsions. Gee, maybe grown-ups aren’t to be trusted after all.

Judges are starting to speak out against the zero-thinking policies they encounter in the law: mandatory sentencing; three strikes laws; federal cramdowns on state laws. Such rules don’t work in the real world, and truth be told they don’t work in the classroom either. It’s time for educators and parents to unite against this prohibition of thinking in our schools.