Education: Ideas for Reform

One of the statements that occurs in almost every official paper evaluating attempts to implement school reform is typified by this sentence from a report at the Rand Institute website.

Other similar statement emphasize leadership, commitment, belief in the program, selection of personnel, etc. There is a story commonly related in leadership courses. A major company tried a number of revisions to its work plan. Each time they carefully discussed what was being done and why with the workers and every time performance improved. The specific reform design was overshadowed by the simple improvement that getting the workers to understand what was being done and why produced. Human beings can perform at very different levels. A motivated human being who believes in what he or she is doing will always perform at a higher level than an unmotivated person.

Any time that a reform is attempted in any system as human intensive as education, the attitude and belief of the people involved will in the short term overshadow the effects of the design change itself. If they believe in and accept the theory on which the design change is based, it will tend to be successful. If they resent it and believe it is being imposed on them against their will, the design change will produce negative results. Only by observing different designs over decades can real empirical evidence that is valid be acquired.

This is going to be especially true of subjective evaluations like those provided by students and teachers participating in the programs. It is natural that students and teachers in private schools will tend to see their school environment as superior to public schools simply because they will feel that private is more special than public. Similarly any ‘special’ program implemented on a voluntary basis will tend to be praised as superior to any regular program.

Counteracting this effect is the expertise of the participants. People will be naturally more expert at implementing designs which are familiar to them and less capable of effectively implementing unfamiliar designs. Given these factors clear empirical analysis of various attempts at school reform is difficult at best.

Modeling Major Reform

The basic principle of political philosophy is to seek guidance in Nature for methods of fulfilling the role of the Social Contract. It is necessary that some form of public education exist. It is also implicit in the Social Contract that that education should be for the good of the Citizens. What will promote the good of the Citizens is guided by understanding Nature and how Nature shaped the Nature of humanity. There is a need for the Social Contract to specifically address the manner in which technological advances create an artificial environment for human beings which is emotionally or psychologically harmful to them and to, through culture or law, attempt to correct these problems. In this context of seeing natural as good and artificial as bad, there is one idea for the reform of our educational system which stands out as inherently valid.

This idea is called multi-age classes. It exists in a number of forms and for a number of reasons. It is a growing trend in schools today, though there are controversies about it, and there are difficulties in implementing it. The age segregation of our school system creates an artificial and unnatural environment for our children to grow up in. Multi-age classes put children into a more natural environment where other older children provide role models and help in their development. A pithy quote which communicates this quite clearly is,

Age-segregated school systems are a product of the military-industrial approach to modeling human society. The age-segregated model was brought to the US from Prussia. This is documented in a number of theses on multi-age classes on the web, http://multiageinfo.dnswh.com/thesis.htm is a fairly long one, http://wsd.waupaca.k12.wi.us/wlc/primary/multi/multigrad.html is a shorter single page discussion. One source cited is Anderson, Robert H. "The Return of the Nongraded Classroom." The Multiage Classroom: A Collection. Ed. Robin Fogarty. Palatine: IRI/Skylight Publishing, 1993. The age-segregated classroom was adopted beginning in the 1840’s along with the industrial revolution. It tends to sacrifice subtle realities of human nature to a simplistic idea of efficiency. This kind of error is typical of the failings of utopian social designers throughout history.

It is advisable for the psychological health of children to provide them with a learning environment which they are adapted to, not one designed by some engineering professor equating children to machines in a factory. Nor is one designed by some General Officer in 19^th Century Prussia the correct approach for creating the healthiest psychological environment for our developing children.

One of the issues involved is pecking order behavior. Throughout this book pecking order behavior has been identified as the antithesis of legitimate human rights psychology. All Citizens have a vested interest in a school system or method which promotes legitimate human rights psychology and which does not promote behaviors which are antithetical to such psychology.

Children are naturally part of a hierarchical structure. They are not old enough, strong enough, or knowledgeable enough to govern themselves. They must accept some sort of hierarchical system in their lives. In the case of educating children there is no choice but to subject them to some kind of hierarchical or pecking order structure. The question becomes what sort of hierarchy will they be subjected to?

The multi-age classroom provides a natural hierarchy based on age and experience. The age-segregated classroom removes the natural hierarchy. On the face of it the age-segregated classroom which removes the natural hierarchy and segregates children into groups of roughly equal age and ability is more egalitarian and would produce a Citizen body more adjusted to an equal rights society.

The problem with this is that humans are hierarchical by nature. Some sort of hierarchical structure is necessary for society, and in the absence of a natural hierarchy an artificial or unnatural hierarchy develops.

http://ericcass.uncg.edu/virtuallib/bullying/1041.html contains a paper entitled “Addressing the Risk of Bullying in Mixed Age Groups” by Dianne E. McClellan. This article recognizes and addresses the concern that putting bigger older children with smaller younger children will increase the risk of bullying. The general conclusion is that it decreases problems with bullying.

One reason for this is that dominance struggle does not happen when one person is clearly dominant and another is not. Thus, a same age class accentuates the struggle for dominance and the need to oppress or suppress others who appear a challenge. No challenge to dominance exists between older and younger children.

This drive to learn from older children and to teach younger children is probably instinctive. It develops a trust of other children which is natural, but absent in age segregated educational systems. Studies have shown that minority children benefit most from multi-age classrooms. Such children come from single parent homes more often than others and the role models provided by older children may help compensate for the absence of such role models in the home.

Leadership hierarchies in age segregated classrooms are based on physical and social aggressiveness, fear of loss of status, need to belong to the group, and similar factors. They promote mindless obedience to peer pressure, aggressive attacks on others, distrust of others, and other negative behaviors. They are also permanent. A nerd one year will still be a nerd next year. The bully will still be the bully, the victim the victim year after year. It is possibly a cheap shot to point out again that this system was copied from possibly the most militaristic society in history, Prussia.

Leadership hierarchies in multi-age classrooms are based on real differences in age and ability which equip the older children to help the younger children naturally. They are not permanent like those in age segregated systems, as a child grows older he becomes a teacher looked up to by the younger students. They promote trust, self-respect, a willingness to nurture and help others. Despite superficial advantages associated with age segregated classes, multi-age grouping of children in our educational system is clearly the superior choice.

There are problems associated with it. Curriculum is easier to standardize for the same age group. Teachers may have to work harder to present the material on different levels for the different children. Achievement testing may be more difficult to standardize.

There are also differences in how you manage it. These differences make a pure multi-age classroom difficult to effectively design and manage. One solution to this might be a multi-age homeroom with regular age segregated classes. The children could have first and last period in the multi-age home room giving them a chance to learn from and teach each other. The older children could help the younger with their homework, thus reviewing the material themselves and increasing their own understanding, in a way which increases their own self-esteem and motivates them to study harder so they will look good to the younger children.

Such a multi-age homeroom should include children from about 5 to 12 or 13. They should stay with the same home-room teacher from kindergarten through about sixth grade. They would have recess and lunch together. This compromise appears to offer the best of both worlds. Children get to experience normal, natural relationships with children of other ages in school, they get to experience helping those younger and being helped by those older than themselves. They also get to go to class and compete with people of roughly equal age and development. They can be tested with their age peers while experiencing a multi-age environment for study and mutual assistance.

Such a system should have a tendency to reduce things like the Columbine High School shooting. Isolation and the sense that no one likes, ever has liked, respects or ever has respected you is probably a significant contributing factor to such events. Young people who remember being looked up to by younger children will not be as subject to this feeling. A teenager who can look back and remember when he was 10 and all the 6, 7, 8 and 9 year olds looked up to him as a role model and guide will not feel the kind of isolation and depression involved. In addition, such a teenager will have something to lose if he does something like Columbine. He will have to face the threat of losing that respect and admiration, of betraying the trust of those people he knows looked up to and respected him in the past. This is a loss that teenagers do not face in the world today where they do not have this experience. The fear of losing the respect and admiration of others can only act as a valid sanction against anti-social actions of the feeling of having had such respect is real.

There are no perfect utopian solutions to problems like those involved in education. Any system will have problems. This is especially true of systems which are new to the people implementing them. Children first brought from the age segregated system to multi-age classes may well bring the negative pecking order behaviors they learned in that system to the multi-age classroom and see the difference in size and age as an opportunity to bully or put down other children. This tendency could be strengthened by maintaining age-segregated classes for much of the day. Teachers must still be alert for bullying, and other problems. In such a compromise system as in other systems, guidance should focus on the values desired. Still, providing a natural multi-age environment for children at school has great promise for helping school be a healthier, better place for children to develop in. It provides an opportunity for normal, healthy development by children which is missing in today’s schools. It works with human nature instead of trying to impose a simplistic regimentation on children which ignores human nature.

Puberty Changes Things

Children entering puberty are suddenly subjected to tremendous changes in their personal appearance and the way they feel about and perceive the world. In addition to visible physical changes, fundamental changes in their hormones and even their brain structure occur. These changes continue into the early twenties. At a point much earlier than modern society likes to admit these young people cease being children and become young adults. They have the drives, the feelings, the hormones, but not the experience of adults. Matt Crenson, a writer for the Associated Press reviews some of the research in an online paper http://www.s-t.com/daily/12-00/12-31-00/e05li127.htm. “But recent research shows that what's going on above teen-agers' necks, not raging hormones, explains the changes.” This statement is misleading. The hormone changes and the changes to the brain interlock. It is the hormones which cause the sudden behavioral changes, it is the brain growth which enables them to learn to handle those changes.
http://www.abanet.org/crimjust/juvjus/factsheets_brain_development.pdf This paper by Adam Ortiz, Soros Criminal Justice Fellow, at the American Bar Association provides a concise summary of current discoveries about these changes in the brain. The point of the paper is to demonstrate that adolescents are not yet physically capable of being held to the same moral standards which adults are held to. It suggests that it is no more legal to prosecute adolescents as adults than it is to prosecute the mentally handicapped as fully capable.

http://www.schmalleger.com/pubs/LS2001-2_2.pdf This paper by Laurence Steinberg presents the arguments against using the PCL to evaluate adolescent psychopathy. It neatly and intelligently summarizes the problems involved and compares the desire for a quick fix point by point to a similar movement associated with eugenics in the early 20^th Century. It is cited here to underscore the degree to which teenagers are different from mature adults and seem similar to psychopaths.

Discussion in an email list devoted to legal and psychological issues occasionally elicits comments suggesting that 40% of adolescents may test out as psychopaths during their teen years. Dr. Robert Hare, one of the leading, possibly the leader, in research on accurately describing psychopathy estimates that only 1% of adults are psychopaths. http://www.crimelibrary.com/criminal_mind/psychology/robert_hare/

During the teen years, humans undergo truly radical changes. They experience for the first time in their lives tremendous overpowering passions and desires which only adults experience. They have no practice in handling these things, and their behavior reflects this.

Significant growth in their brains provides a resource for them to adapt to these changes. This adaptation or learning experience takes time and requires guidance. This process generally begins as they are entering sixth, seventh, or eighth grade. At this point our school system changes from elementary school to middle school or junior high school.

It would be totally unrealistic to not look at this issue as one of the most fundamental issues to be dealt with when discussing education reform. It is especially important to consider how the environment of the school system will contribute to the shaping of brain pathways as they are refined and pruned during adolescence.

As in most developmental issues, the earliest period is probably the most crucial. This period of early puberty is traditionally marked in most primitive societies with some form of initiation ritual officially recognizing the adulthood of the young adult.

In the multi-age homeroom discussed above, at this period the young adult is the oldest child in the class. He or she is the peer authority figure to the younger children. Habit and example have hopefully taught him or her to be a nurturing leader to the younger children. This system provides a one school year initiation into more or less adult responsibility with the advantage of adult supervision provided by the teacher. It is highly unlikely that such an arrangement can fail to have a beneficial effect on the development of the young adult. The length of elementary school should generally be such that this one year experience of leadership responsibility should occur. The presence of sixth or seventh graders in the multi-age homeroom is extremely fortuitous.

Following this period the young adult enters Middle School where he or she interacts with other teenagers. During this period sexual drives are spontaneous and difficult to control. Quite literally the teenager is inundated with drugs created by their own metabolisms which drive them to behave irrationally. The primary stimulus for the creation of these drugs is the presence of members of the opposite sex.

This cannot fail to distract the young adults from being properly attentive to academic materials presented in the class. This suggests quite clearly that some form of sexual segregation during this period of education is advisable. There are other concerns. It is quite possible that sexual development is strongly influenced by the environment. An all boy or all girl school might direct sexual development in ways that could make life more difficult for the young adults as adults. This concern is not a clearly documented as the changes which adolescents undergo during puberty, but it is a real concern.

A compromise between these two concerns might be coed homerooms with same sex classes. The major academic material being presented in same sex class rooms would remove the immediate distraction of members of the opposite sex being present. It would also tend to prevent sexual discrimination by teachers against the individual students on the basis of sex. The coed homeroom would provide a limited interaction between adolescents of different sexes.

In this context the idea of multi-age homerooms faces special difficulties. The probability that teenagers who are inherently more likely to behave abusively than other age groups will use the advantages of age and physical size to bully their younger peers would seem to be automatically much greater. On the other hand, a multi-age classroom in which adolescents of different ages acted as coaches and helpers to each other would be a much more positive environment than the current system of age-segregated classes. A multi-age classroom would build bonds between the younger and older students which do not exist in the current system where bullying of the young by the old is something of a tradition. This is the last period of the young adults life when you want to cast him into the dog eat dog world of brutal pecking order behaviors of the age-segregated system. Assuming that Middle school consisted of only 3 years, 7^th through 9^th grade, the smaller age difference in a multi-age classroom would minimize the potential of bullying. On the other hand, the presence of virtual adults such as 18 year olds about to graduate and much more in control of themselves might work even better to minimize bullying. The question of what presents an optimum design during this period of schooling will only be discovered by long term studies of different models. In most cases the actual implementation of the plan will probably have a greater effect than the plan itself where the contra-indicative factors are so finely balanced. It seems just possible that combining Middle and High School students in multi-age homerooms might be the preferential method. Certainly one room schoolhouses in most of early American history managed to cast older teenagers successfully into leadership roles. History proves that it is possible.

One of the problems associated with modern society is the extension of the educational period long past the point of biological adulthood. This has tended to make society look on young adults as children far past the point in life where they should begin learning to accept near adult responsibility. The multi-age system helps to counteract this tendency as it effects their personal development by providing them with an opportunity and obligation to behave responsibly towards others. The power of high expectations to effect the development of young people should never be underestimated.

There are other plausible advantages to putting Seniors into multi-age classes with much younger, young adults. The older students will be in a position of natural leadership for the younger students. They will also be considering their future outside of school, college, a job, what to do next in their lives. Interacting with them will tend to point the younger students in this direction as well and start them on the path of looking forward and planning for the future in their own lives. The adolescent years should not be looked on as a period of temporary insanity during which we lock young adults up in big institutions hoping that they will magically transition to responsible adults. The adolescent years are a crucial period of development for young people during which they must be exposed to increasing levels of personal responsibility and development.

The principle involved in designing an educational system is almost the opposite of that involved in designing a government where the children are concerned. In designing a government a pessimistic assumption about human nature is necessary. Safeguards, checks and balances, separation of powers designed to prevent those abuses of power which history teaches us are inevitable are the first concern of appropriate government design.

In educating and training people you want to set the highest expectations possible. If you fail to meet the mark, you will still reach a higher level than if you set low expectations. Positive expectations set for young people tend to produce positive results. Negative expectations tend to produce negative results. A system which implicitly sets positive expectations in place is inherently superior to one which implicitly makes negative expectations because it will inherently tend to produce a better result. Thus the multi-age system despite some plausible possible problems is inherently better than the age segregated system on this principle.

This principle applies to the expectations set for the children. The general principle of pessimism about human beings applies to the design of the educational system with regards to the staff and structure. Set high expectations for children to measure up to, and have realistically low expectations about the actions of politicians, lawyers, and bureaucrats.

Some form of multi-age class grouping should continue during the adolescent years. There should also be some form of sexual segregation to promote greater attention to academic values during this period. The exact details of what plan will actually be best over the long haul is something which only experience will discover.

A final plan based on this discussion would be something like this. Elementary schools would have multi-age homerooms including children from kindergarten age to the sixth grade. Much of the curriculum would be presented in roughly same age classes but study periods and coaching would allow older students to help younger students and benefit from thus reviewing the earlier material themselves.

After puberty, homerooms containing young adults from the 7^th to 12^th grades would continue the multi-age environment during the adolescent years. To prevent academic difficulties caused by raging hormones much of the curriculum would be presented in same sex, same age classes during the day. In this model some coordination between elementary and young adult schools could exist. Children who spent their elementary years in a specific homeroom could be transferred to the new multi-age homeroom in the young adult system where other students from the same homeroom preceded them. This would provide continuity, and a ready group of coaches and helpers for the younger students in the new environment thus easing the transition.

Homerooms such as this would be similar to Fraternities and Sororities in College. They would have names, symbols, mascots, and traditions. This will prove quite attractive to children providing them with a sense of identity. It will also be similar to the Houses in the Harry Potter books and will thus be especially attractive to young people today. The popularity of this kind or organization is perennial. Like all aspects of human nature it can have both positive and negative elements. Teachers would provide a level of adult supervision not present and not desirable in College and of course the children would not live in Frat houses.

It is quite possible that currently existing College organizations of this sort might build relationships with such homeroom organizations. This would tend to increase the tendency of young people to perceive themselves as College bound. These developments as all developments represent possible problems as well as advantages. The advantages seem to outweigh the problems overall.

Curriculum reforms

The purpose of an educational system is to educate. While it is necessary that it should not create an environment which is psychologically or emotionally harmful to children, it is still an educational system. Curriculum should focus on skill sets which prepare children for life.

Curriculum which is driven by political or moral agendas take time away from the real needs of children to learn real skills. Too many strange elective classes which provide a way of satisfying credit requirements without really providing the education children will need as adults also siphon educational time away from the necessities to the peripheral.

Curriculum should be focused on real educational goals not on satisfying every special interest or political agenda.

This principle should not be implemented in a simple minded or mechanistic manner. Human nature is complex. Many skills which may not seem related may reinforce each other is complex unexpected ways. Music seems to help with mathematics. Art may reinforce other skills and abilities.

Physical education should be emphasized more and differently than it apparently is in the current system. It seems to have suffered a great deal over the last few years emphasizing nearly professional sports values rather than sportsmanship. Physical development is necessary and natural. Our modern life is much less physical than the life which we evolved to live. Physical exertion releases compounds into our system which contribute to our mental and emotional health. Experiencing this is an important part of the development of our youth.

Charter Schools

Charter Schools are experiments in education method and technique. There is no one model or standard for Charter Schools. Many are probably relatively mindless imitations of other models implemented badly in response to a faddish popularity of the idea that Charter Schools are somehow better.

Others may very possibly represent valid improvements on current educational models. The existence of a body of schools trying experimental techniques to see what works and what does not is a positive thing.

When you put it that way it suddenly sounds unethical. Charter Schools are laboratory experiments on children to see what does and does not work in educating them. Do you want your children to be subjected to some kind of hair brained experiment in education?

Scientifically the existence of the Charter School movement appears to be a good thing. Society seems to believe in general that we need to try new techniques in education to reform our system. A variety of experimental educational systems will over time provide fact based information on how to accomplish such reforms.

Ethically, the Charter School movement appears to be questionable, even irresponsible. Whether or not children go to a Charter School is really a parental decision. Does the parent believe the school will be a good or bad thing? Does the parent think the changes in the Charter School will work better or worse than a standard school?

In the end, in the majority of cases, the quality of teachers and their personal belief in what they are doing will prove more important than most differences in modeling educational structure.

School Vouchers

There is a great deal of debate on the issue of School Vouchers. One of the fundamental points frequently raised is the violation of separation of Church and State by subsidizing education in religious schools. The other fundamental issue is the right of parents to choose what school their children go to. Providing School Vouchers to parents gives them freedom of choice about what school to send their children to with the appearance of providing a state subsidy to religious schools.

Clearly this is an issue where the parent should have a deciding voice. If it is not objectionable to the parent to send their child to a Catholic school, how can the State deny them the freedom to do so. The State is not subsidizing these schools, the parent is. Does the money which we as taxpayers provide for the education of our future citizens belong to the State, or does it belong to the parents of the children being educated, held in trust by the State?

In reality, providing State support to Public Schools which frequently seem to be providing a Religious Education in the values of the Church of Secular Humanism of the Shining Path of Political Correctness while not providing vouchers to other religious schools is a form of religious discrimination. Belief systems are belief systems. Beliefs about fundamental moral and ethical questions creep into educational systems.

A State funded educational system provides a means for the indoctrination of the young in a value set. This means that people with political and moral agendas will strive to achieve control over it and see that it is their values which are indoctrinated. To pretend that such indoctrination does not impinge on Separation of Church and State by simply claiming that one set of beliefs is not a religion is unrealistic. It is wrong to provide State funding to one set of political/moral beliefs and deny it to others.

It is better for the parents to make the decision than for the State to do so. School vouchers provide a protection against the usurpation of the Public School system by one or another belief system which then uses it to indoctrinate all our children in those beliefs. In practice it maintains the Separation of Church and State by maintaining choice.

Teacher Salary and Class Size

There should be some kind of direct relationship between teacher salary and class size. Assuming that there is a limited amount of money to be spent on education, the more you pay the teachers the fewer you can afford to teach the same number of children and the larger the class size must be. The less you pay the teachers the more you can afford and the smaller the class size can be.

On the other hand, higher salaries should draw better people and lower salaries will be settled for by less ambitious or capable people. Or, do you want people teaching your children who are there for the money or people who are there for the satisfaction of the job. The second kind of person, a person with a calling to teach will teach as long as the salary is livable.

Teaching is a kind of public service like police work, being a fireman, or a soldier. It is a kind of calling or way of life, and people in all these fields are paid less than people of similar ability and education in other fields. The American Federation of Teachers website http://www.aft.org/research/survey01/index.html states that average beginning salaries for teachers today are around 29,000 dollars. http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos160.htm#earnings is the website of the US Dept of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, it contains data on police salaries. According to this site, the minimum for a fulltime sworn officer is 31,000 a year. Overtime can add significantly to that. Median earnings were 39,790. Still below what AFT says was a beginning offer in the civilian sector. After 20 years in the military I was making 22,622 dollars a year. A beginning teacher makes more than a Staff Sergeant with 20 years experience in the Army. While allowance for quarters and commuted rations would bring my salary after 20 years close to an average beginning teachers salary, it remains true that compared to teachers I am a big loser financially. When it comes to beginning military salaries, a PFC with a wife and child makes so little that they would qualify for food stamps, except that food stamps are not given to soldiers. Have you ever been in the position of having to explain to a young soldier why a drug addicted welfare mom gets food stamps and a US soldier can’t? I have.

On the other hand, again according to the AFT website people qualified as teachers receive offers of 42,712 for non-teaching jobs. So it depends on where you look. If you compare teaching salaries to other public service fields, other areas where a sense of mission or a calling is presumed to exist, they are not the lowest or the highest. There are strong arguments about salaries in these different areas. Teachers shape the youth, the future of the country. They deserve more. Police are in a high risk position, protecting the citizens on a daily basis, they deserve more. Military put their lives on the line overseas to defend the country, they deserve more. As a retired military person I cannot summon up a sense of outrage about how low teachers salaries are.

It is important to pay teachers enough so that they do not feel that they are inferior or considered inferior by society. People with a sense of mission or calling to do a certain job are willing to settle for lower pay because they gain personal respect and dignity from their job itself. This means that in the long run, they tend to be underpaid compared to civilian occupations where it is all about the money. This is true of teachers, police, firefighters, and the military. It is something the civilian sector should keep in mind. It is necessary periodically to raise their pay to make it closer to being competitive to the civilian sector. On the other hand, it is equally true that in these professions you want people who are there because of a sense of personal commitment and mission, not because of the money so attempting to buy the best is not the right strategy.

On a simple basis, assuming a limited budget for education, raising the salary of ten teachers 10% means losing one teacher and distributing those children among the remaining teachers. Slightly lower salaries means one or two additional teachers and slightly smaller classes. Smaller classes can increase the effectiveness of education, but only when class size begins to drop to 20 or below. It seems unlikely that an average class size of 18 is going to be fiscally possible in the near future.

The inverse relationship between class size and teacher salaries makes this particular area of education reform unpromising. A realistic solution will be a compromise between the two concerns and is unlikely to produce any significant results or differ significantly from what market forces have already produced.

A private school for the extremely affluent could possibly afford to maximize these two factors at great expense, but it is doubtful that public education can do so. This area is resistant to reform. While perfect optimization of this area is probably economically unviable, society should attempt to provide class sizes small enough to create an effective teaching environment.