On Modern Educational Thinking, Part 1

Last week I ruminated on the evolution of my thinking about educational research. In short, I had joined my thinking to a large number of educators, policymakers, and researchers who valued quantitative measures as the best way to make decisions about education. This is a view I developed while working as a special education teacher and because I had to develop ways to redesign my entire classroom around teaching literacy. I spent time looking at handbooks of research and methodologies developed, largely, by educational psychologists, language pathologists, and cognitive linguists. The approaches were clinical. The research was clinical too - in one case I was reviewing FMRI results showing how reading, writing, listening, and speaking reinforced neural pathways and, in some cases, built new ones. These handbooks and articles were fairly uniform in their literacy recommendations: students should receive direct instruction in the specifics of phonemes, phonics, and grammar. These handbooks and articles were fairly uniform in their philosophy of education: the best practices emerged from quantitative measures of student performance. These could be full on experiments (and many of the articles were high quality randomized double blinded trials on students in literacy clinics) or they could be more practical research situated in classrooms or schools.

I am not totally divorced from the legitimacy of this kind of research. In fact, I think it offers the best option for students who need literacy interventions because they are not acquiring the reading and writing skills they need as they progress through grade levels. However, I made far too much of a connection between these kinds of studies and the larger testing apparatus. In part, I was chasing test scores too. My students improved dramatically in their literacy over the course of a few months of receiving direct instruction and the final measure, the one that would validate my work in the classroom, was the annual ELA exam given by my state. Because I assumed that my teaching was scientifically supported, I felt the test (and all high stakes testing) had some degree of scientific validity. It was a bit of flawed inductive reasoning on my part and motivated by my desire to do some good.  It turns out that my thinking wasn't unique or even that new. Indeed, the pursuit of more "scientific" curriculum and more "measurement" of learning is as old as modern education.

In the late 1800s, as Western countries rapidly industrialized in the wake of the industrial revolution, education moved from the domain of the wealthy and the connected to the masses. This was the result of a variety of forces but the primary motivator was economic. Manufacturing demanded a large and competent labor force able to mange valuable machinery. Laborers sought higher wages and prosperity, often best achieved through working in factories or other industrial activities. These pressures combined with a social impetus toward a more representative politics throughout Europe and America meant that the classical education of earlier centered came under pressure. Up to that point, education was largely along the lines of what we would today call a "classical" education or a "humanist" education. Students would learn Greek and Latin and would study the mythology, philosophy, mathematics, and history of both those ancient cultures in the ancient languages. Even the youngest of students would master the languages before mastering the remainder.

As that century closed, this view of education came under pressure from a movement for more scientific education. The masses would not value from mastery of the classics and weren't well served by learning ancient languages in elementary school - the average level of attendance was low and mostly through the early grades. What good would Latin do a young boy working mechanized looms in a Manhattan factory? The emerging science of psychology sought to answer these new demands. Becoming ever more separate from philosophy as a discipline, psychologists urged for schools to adopt a scientific approach to curriculum. The Kliebard text form which I am pulling some of this history calls this branch of reformers developmentalists.

Championed by G. Stanley Hall, developmentalists believed that schools ought to teach students in accordance with their mental development. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. A lot of our current education, especially literacy education, is driven by a focus on students progressing through a variety of stages (probably the biggest name in modern literacy development is Jeanne Chall). At that time, Hall and his contemporaries were heavily influenced by German pedagogical models which had their origins in pre-unification Prussia. Although less militaristic than the German versions, Hall brought back the "science" of child development and pushed for major education reforms based on those ideas.

I should probably mention at this point just how unscientific Hall's science was. The developmentalists followed a theory of development called "culture-epoch theory." You see, "science" taught them that the brain developed through stages just as human society had evolved. A young child was like a cave-man and should learn content similar to that which would be of interest to a cave man - put them outdoors, let them draw, learn sounds, or play at hunting. Then, as the child progressed through to the "ancient" epoch they could begin learning famous mythology and stories from the bible. Eventually the child's brain would reach the renaissance and then the modern era as they entered early adulthood. This strange view was initially the most dominant challenge to a classical education and much of early psychological science was built on testing students to determine their "culture-epoch" and deliver appropriate content. Much of it was driven, too, by social Darwinism which argued that many people (read brown people, women, some immigrants) would never reach the modern era and didn't need to be in school for very long.

There were two reasons this view was so popular. First, it was built on established "science" of the day and was widely respected. At this point, schools of education were not common and often existed as subsidiaries to psychology or philosophy departments. Those departments often set the agenda for research and recommendations about policy or curriculum. Second, the culture-epoch theory offered a model to organize schools for the masses. Children could be broken up largely by age and the content delivered and apportioned according to their mental and social evolution. In an era where there was little or no continuity from one school to the next or one state to the next, a uniform curriculum was something people recognized as a way to exert control - especially in states where universal compulsory education was enacted. This "legibility" was seen as a way to make schools accountable. If kids were progressing through the epochs, it was generally seen as an evidence of teachers and schools doing their jobs. Since the developmentalists relied heavily on testing, schools and their overseers were able to keep a close eye on performance.

This whole approach sounds decidedly current - with the exception of the weird culture-epoch thing. But, let me pose a question: As I noted last week, there is very strong evidence that our current testing regime is totally invalid and contributes to the marginalization of minorities, especially black men. Is our high-stakes testing regime any more valid than the developmentalist approach of the 1880s? For me, it seems like the answer is no. Both offered a solution to accountability and both led to significant abuses which resulted in a system supportive of white supremacy.

Thankfully, the humanists and developmentalists were not the only game in town during the construction of our modern education system. Another scientific approach to education was in the offing, social efficiency.. Sharing the developmentalist fondness for measurement, the social efficiency crowd sought to educate the masses specifically for employment. In my next post, I'll take a closer look at the ideas underpinning social efficiency and how they compare to our "new" focus on educating children for the workforce.

Minor edits for clarity because I don't proofread! -J

Reforming my thinking about Education and Research

I've been doing some reading recently in preparation for this fall's classes and figured I'd write a little about what I'd been thinking. Last year I had attempted to write about the research I'd come across. Throughout the summer courses, I kept pace with some of the interesting articles and concepts but once the core classes for the MA began in the fall, I found myself with little to write about. Now, that's not to say I didn't do a lot of writing but very little was about research - or at least what I thought of as research.

In the universe of education, as I have lamented before, there isn't a lot of quantitative research which trickles down into the classroom. Both this MA and my prior MAT focused heavily on "teacher research" and on research methods drawn from sociology and anthropology. When we do find quantitative research, it's often coming from economics and political science departments or, more often, policy oriented non-profits, NGOs, and foundations. My friends and many long time educators recognize the problems in taking quantitative research from outside education as a means for driving school, district, and state policy. That's more or less how we got NCLB, Common Core, and RTTT which have not been the panacea of reforms that were initially hoped for. That's not to say all all quantitative research is bad or even that quantitative research from outside schools of education is somehow always disconnected from the reality of schooling. Indeed, I can't think of a better example than economist and data scientist Raj Chetty's recent work with the Census Bureau's Maggie Jones and Sonya Porter.

In fact, as a fan of Chetty's work since his 2015 look at income mobility, I was struck by the granularity of the conclusions. More so than any other large dataset work I am aware of, Chetty, Jones, and Porter exposed the out and out racism of our society and, especially, our school system. Of particular interest are the results for black boys growing up in the US, but what stood out to me was something Chetty said repeatedly in several interviews. I'll excerpt a large section here from an interview he gave to Talk Poverty:

We really don’t think differences in ability explain the gaps that we’re documenting, and there are two simple reasons for that. The first is the pattern that I just described of downward mobility across generations. It’s really only there for black boys. Black women do just about as well as white women once you control for their parental income. And that suggests first of all, if you look at most prior theories of differences in cognitive ability, The Bell Curve book for example, it does not present evidence that you’d expect these differences to vary by gender. Furthermore, if you look at test score data, which is the basis for most prior theories about differences in ability, the fact that black kids when they’re in school tend to score lower on standardized tests than white kids, that actually is true for both black boys and for black girls to the same extent. In contrast when you look at earnings there are dramatic gender differences.
And so that suggests that these tests are actually not really capturing in a very accurate way differences in ability as they matter for long-term outcomes, which casts doubt on that whole body of evidence. So, based on that type of reasoning, we really think this is not about differences in ability. One final piece of evidence that echoes that is if you look at kids who move to different areas, areas where we see better outcomes for black kids, you see that they do much better themselves, which again demonstrates that environment seems to be important. This is not about immutable factors like differences in ability.

Let me emphasize a particular part again: "that suggests that these tests are actually not really capturing in a very accurate way differences in ability as they matter for long-term outcomes, which casts doubt on that whole body of evidence."

What Chetty's done here is confirm with data what people in education have been saying for decades. Teachers responded to the post-2001 testing regime (followed by Common Core standardized testing) by pointing out that tests are often racially biased and often fail to adequately capture students' real-world abilities. I've written before that schools have fallen under a bastardized view of constructivism which posits that access to the content standards is all that's required for a student to succeed. So, after almost two decades of reorganizing our system of schooling behind a testing regime, we have high quality empirical evidence that the whole thing is directly harmful to black males.

Why is this "reforming" my thinking, as the post's title suggests? It's because that conclusion was something that had already been reached. I figured it out during my teacher training. I saw that view confirmed in my teacher research in 2009 and again in my teacher research this year. (It's just a draft, be kind!) My friends in education and my own experiences as a teacher indicated the system was deeply flawed, racist, and classist. Systemic racism something that ethnographic researchers have been documenting in US education since the late 1800s. Why, then, was I so dismissive of qualitative research's findings and role in the classroom, in curriculum, and in educational policy? Why wait for someone like Chetty, who appears to be somewhat unique in the field, to publish findings pulled from large data sets? Moreover, if the vast majority of data used to make educational policy is pulled from the standardized tests which are deeply flawed, what good is the data?

After reviewing a few of my old posts, I came across something I'd written:

Education, in general, dislikes quantitative research. Maybe this is a response to NCLB/RTTT and the current incarnation of the reform movement? Standardized testing is widely misused by states and districts and is a tool used by politicians to break the political power of teachers unions. This has bred distrust of any quantitative measures. In turn, any data which relies on high-stakes testing is seen as illegitimate by many educators whether the use of that data is accurate/valid or not. There are elements of social justice here because testing is seen as a proxy for race, socioeconomic status, and other factors. Any quantitative measure is potentially racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise heavily biased. 

Well, it turns out that standardized testing is racist. Data which relies on high-stakes testing is illegitimate. The critics of testing that I was so quick to doubt were right, and I should have given them more credence. Even my attempts to be even handed and consider multiple sides of issues were still filtered through my perception that data = test scores or something numerical and data != observations, interviews, or analysis of work samples, etc. What Chetty's work and my own work this past year have helped me to see is that I need to take a wider view of the qualitative side of things. I'm actually quite proud of what I wrote as part of my case studies for the Master's Project even if it was "only qualitative".

I've learned some other interesting things recently about the history of education and education research. Stay tuned for further posts because I'd like to tackle a pair of books: Kliebard's The Struggle for the American Curriculum and Lageman's An Elusive Science. What I've come to realize from reading these books is that education never forgets. Once an idea enters the educational universe, it sticks around and reemerges over and over. This is true of the supposedly scientific approach championed by the "reformers" who implemented our modern standardized testing regime.