In other words you have no rational reason to “hew to your view”. That’s a shame, I would have liked to have heard a good argument, I might have learnt something. C’est la vie, especially on the Internet.

I will also note that observation is not enough to tell us about life. Observations can be wrong, for example stage magicians manage to fool my eyes regularly. On a more scientific scale – sex does not cause pregnancy. Successful implantation of a fertilised egg into the uterus’s wall causes pregnancy – so an egg can be fertilised outside the womb and implanted at the right time and the mother’s body takes it from there, explaining test tube babies. This is the value in discussing our observations, so that others can point out alternative explanations, even of things that seem entirely certain to us.

My ans. to your question is that I am a sentient being who has lived and breathed for 65 yrs on the planet. One doesn’t have to fly to the surface of the sun to know that it is hot. You sound like an early sixties behaviorist who thinks that unless one can quantify something it doesn’t exist. This is a blog, not a foot-noted research paper.

But exactly how does one really know anyway unless by observation through life experience? And where else BUT “society” DO attitudes about education and schools come from? That part of society involved in formal “education” hardly exists in suspended animation; it is inextricably intertwined with the warp and woof of society as a whole. Your question seems nonsensical to me. It would only make sense if you challenged the nature of the changes I described—except for the fact I didn’t outline them in any detail. Is it to THIS omission (for brevity’s sake) of mine that you now complain? (Now the question of to what extent any such changed attitudes as I might outline are widely held, etc., and just exactly what the nature of these changed views actually consist of is an area capable of being empirically examined and measured in some detail and being constructively argued about) But let me ask you: From what source do YOU think any changes in the public’s attitude towards the nature of schools and the value of education are derived, the planet Mongo? Does Ming the Merciless beam his “attitude ray” our way to bathe Earth in all ideas educational? Inquiring minds want to know.

I am sorry that you don’t have the reference to hand from Harris. I am hoping to get my hands on the Rothstein chapter eventually. I agree with you that skilled improvers often fail, which is why I didn’t offer any solutions when you asked me directly.

Virgil xenephon: Why do you “hew to the view” that the changes in the value placed on education are caused by changes in society outside schools? Do you have any rational reasons for your belief, and if so, would you like to share them with us?

Alan, if schools were intended to preserve the status quo then they’ve massively sucked. Since the start of the 1950s for example, we’ve seen the Civil Rights movement, leading to the USA electing a black president, the second wave of feminism, a rise in the divorce rate, a rise in the rate of children born out of wedlock, a decline in trade unions, a rise in the crime rate, the invention of the Internet, a continually-increasing rate of funding going to healthcare, a far stronger environmental movement, the spread of denim jeans and the decline in hat-wearing, etc. I approve of some of those changes and disapprove of others, but it hardly strikes me that the status quo has been preserved.
Of course this is not to say that schools caused the status quo to change. All my brief history says is that schools haven’t managed to preserve the status quo.

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

John Taylor Gatto won awards for New York City teacher of the year and New York State teacher of the year, and has researched the history of government schools in the United States. Surprise! many of those who founded the system were quite explicit that it was not their intention to actually educate children, but rather to train them to be useful for industry.

Lower class kids need real education and even more than that, a simulacrum of the home environment that middle class kids get. There’s a public school boarding school in DC I think that provides that with good results.

I sent my kids to an elementary school in the worst neighborhood in town, which was a French immersion magnet school. 85% of the kids were from from welfare families and they were the only kids in the school that didn’t qualify for free lunches. I had to make special arrangements at the school office to pay at the beginning of every term.

Now they’re doing just fine in college and grad school, and are fluent in French.

Well, the data is what it is, and if I end up on the “better side of the divide” it’s only because I had the good judgement to pick the parents I did and the time in history I was born into. To have the good fortune to have grown up on a college campus as the son of two educators and have gone to the on-campus Lab School in a day and time when even my 3rd grade teachers had their MA from Columbia Teacher’s College, it would have taken a lot for me to turn out otherwise. But believe me, I am not a “credentialist” for it’s own sake, even though my wife and I are both multi-degree professionals. There is a lot of truth to Mark Twain’s old aphorism that “one should never let ‘schooling’ get in the way of a good education.” And while it certainly seems that there is plenty of room for “doable” educational improvement within our existing sociopolitical framework as Tracy W suggests, above, I nonetheless continue to hew to the view that changes in our culture that hugely affect education in a highly dysfunctional way which began, like so many other cultural changes, in the late sixties, early seventies and continue unto this day, are the root cause of our educational decline, hence much school-based improvement is seen by me as doing little more than re-arranging the deck chairs. And since most of these cultural changes are one’s the left actually lionizes and propagates, it is no wonder that that a) many here would refuse to admit even of the existence of such a miasma or the validity of my characterizations and b) why you and I might be at loggerheads over this issue.

I don’t know if we are talking at cross purposes. Here are three things I believe:

1. Many schools make (educationally) inefficient use of the resources they have.

2. Getting those schools to make more efficient use of resources they have can only rarely be done without additional expenditures.

3. Additional expenditures going to the standard operating budgets of those schools are unlikely to cause significant improvements.

I think you agree with 1 and 3; but you seem to disagree with 2. That’s fine, but you’re not going to convince me, and the links you’ve provided, while they support 1, don’t seem to me to contradict 2.

I am not arguing that schools can improve without spending any money at all, I am arguing that many schools in the OECD can improve with the existing money they are already getting. Take this data from the OECD on school effectiveness: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/28/34/39254975.xls. The USA and Italy are spending about twice as much per student in PPP terms as Korea and Ireland, for worse results at least by the measures used. Another example can be seen by rising education spending within a country, and whether that has any effect on education outcomes. For the USA, http://www.heritage.org/research/Education/bg2179.cfm, for the UK http://www.bowgroup.org/harriercollectionitems/Ed%20Spend%20Final.pdf
In other words, it looks to me like there is ample scope for improving education by rearranging existing funding.
Now I could be wrong, but I recently re-read John Stuart Mill “On Liberty” and he’s convinced me about the benefit of determined skepticism even of a theory that is true, as it encourages the people on the side of truth to fully understand their own arguments, in the effort to refute pig-headed skeptics like me, and hopefully shore up any weak points. To some extent I am consciously playing Devil’s Advocate here (although when it comes to my replies to RobertdFeniman, that’s entirely what I believe).

The Race Between Education and Technology offers a great deal of evidence arguing otherwise.

Unfortunately, self-esteem is no longer prized by public school personnel.

For some time now, we have been in the era of character education.

A couple of years ago our middle school was so plastered over with character words that a friend of mine said he felt like he had taken a trip to North Korea every time he set foot inside the place.

Yes, as everyone knows, the number of people taking the SAT’s and attending college has increased enormously. But it is totally incorrect to attribute the decline in SAT scores to “immigrants.”

Attitudes towards education were never very serious.

A woman about the same age as you would have had very little non-social reason to attend college unless she intended to teach, and therefore would have taken no algebra or higher math, no science, likely no foreign language or history. All she needed to do was take dictation, type, and subtract. There was no GI Bill or officer training likely in her future either.

And your argument about when the decline occurred would be immensely more persuasive if you yourself didn’t end up on the “better” side of the divide.

SAT scores began to decline in 1964 and hit bottom in 1980. After that math scores recovered to some degree but verbal scores did not. In 1995, SAT scores were “recentered,” making a score of 500 on either the math or verbal sections once again the mean. College Board SAT score equivalents are here.

DEFINING LITERACY DOWNWARD by Diane Ravitch

Virgil – I don’t know why the change, but one theory is implied by Siegfried Engelmann in pages 7 and 8 of this http://www.zigsite.com/PDFs/CurriculumCauseFailure.pdf. Basically he argues that badly thought out curriculae without a logical sequence of learning risks teaching students that schoolwork is arbitrary, because topics are introduced and then never referred to again.
Also, plausibly, if a kid never learns to read very well, all the rest of academic work at school is going to be very discouraging. (Says me who learnt to read fine, but loathed PE because I sucked at it, so can sympathise with those who struggled with reading.)