A glimpse of ‘inside education’

Sixth grade Poor Elijah was an “inside baseball” kind of fan. He knew all the finer points about squeeze plays and the Boudreau shift that “outsiders” don’t appreciate, and that sadly leave blank stares in his 21st century students’ eyes.

Here’s a glimpse of “inside education.”

Experts and teachers have long disputed the value of math facts. Some are “adamant that kids must memorize the basics,” while others are equally certain that memorization “damages youngsters” and “stunts their understanding of math concepts.”

There’s some confusion about the Common Core’s position. The standards never use the word “memorize” with regard to addition and multiplication facts. Instead, they require that students will “know from memory” their addition and multiplication facts.

Being an outsider, you might think “memorize” and “know from memory” mean the same thing, but according to one commentator, “some math folks say that there’s a big difference.” To clear things up, she asked Jason Zimba, one of three “lead writers of the Common Core math standards.” He described the standards’ language as “unambiguous” but did acknowledge there’s a technical difference because memorizing is a “process” and knowing from memory is an “end.”

Some educators are also confused about whether “know from memory” is different from “being fluent in.” According to Mr. Zimba, fluent means being “accurate and reasonably fast” with calculations. Since memory is fast, and if you’ve remembered correctly, it’s also accurate, they’re related, but “they aren’t the same thing.” Knowing that “eight times five equals 40” involves memory, but knowing the related calculation that “40 divided by five equals eight” involves fluency.

If you’re starting to get a headache, you should probably avoid faculty meetings.

Alongside these dizzying details that preoccupy education experts, Mr. Zimba’s qualifications offer an insight into what constitutes expertise. His mathematics credentials are impressive. He majored in math and astrophysics, earned a master’s degree from Oxford and a doctorate from Berkeley, and was a Rhodes Scholar. He’s never, however, taught in a public school, a deficiency he shares with his two fellow “lead writers.”

People would have been justifiably outraged if the mathematics standards for our students had been written by teachers who didn’t know math. It’s equally absurd, and we should be equally outraged that they were written by mathematicians who aren’t teachers. Surely, we could have found people who were both. We should have. Unfortunately, the chief qualifying credential for being an education expert is you can’t be a teacher. Remember that the next time you wonder why public education trips from one folly to another.

Sir Ken Robinson is a roving education authority. His résumé is revealing and typical. After earning his Ph.D. researching the role of theater in education, he served as director of England’s Arts in Schools Project. He’s also been an education professor, written several books about education, and advised institutions and governments concerning education. These days he bills himself as “an internationally recognized leader in the development of education, creativity, and innovation.”

Notice that while he’s been very busy talking and writing about education, he’s also never taught in a public school classroom.

Sir Ken reasserts the old reform complaint that public schools are “stuck in an industrial, one-size-fits-all mold.” Reformers have been delivering this sermon since the 1970s. That’s when they decreed that schools should eliminate classroom walls so students could “explore topics that match their aptitude and passions,” a disaster that led to A Nation at Risk’s conclusion that American curriculum had become a “diluted” “smorgasbord” with too many students choosing “appetizers and dessert.”

He also resurrects interdisciplinary education, urging that schools stop teaching subjects like algebra, chemistry, and literature “in isolation” so students can “connect what they know.” Sadly, the past 40 years have demonstrated that students who don’t learn algebra and literature as separate subjects tend not to know enough to connect either to anything.

Sir Ken contends that traditional education doesn’t work anymore because “today’s youths can communicate instantly via smartphone, email, Facebook, and Twitter.” First of all, people have been communicating instantly ever since they had mouths. As for instant electronic communication, that’s been a fact of life since Alexander Graham Bell first talked to Mr. Watson in the next room.

Sir Ken calls for “more personalized” education and “greater flexibility in choice.” He believes all children are “natural-born learners” and teachers are like “gardeners” who “create the best conditions” for their “plants,” meaning their students, to “grow themselves” and learn “anywhere, anytime.”

Unfortunately, greater student “choice” perpetuates the “smorgasbord” that’s torpedoed achievement since the 1970s. As for learning “anywhere, anytime,” all you need for that is a book.

While the education world hangs on the pronouncements of experts such as these, a 2016 analysis of 30 studies conducted over 15 years reached a conclusion that should have been common sense – the “more experienced” a teacher is, the more “effective” he is. The resulting “gains in student achievement” continue “throughout a teacher’s career,” not only for the veteran teacher’s students, but also for “the school as a whole.” “Novice teachers” in particular “benefit most from having more experienced colleagues.” In short, “a more experienced teaching workforce offers numerous benefits to students and schools.”

This raises an important question we should answer the next time we run into an education expert.

If more experience is better, how much is no experience worth?

Being an outsider, you might think “memorize” and “know from memory” mean the same thing, but according to one commentator, “some math folks say that there’s a big difference.”