Defenders of science standards way ahead of their time

Why is it that proponents of the Next Generation Science Standards want to inject religion into the discussion of the standards?

In response to my op-ed in the Herald-Leader today, Pete Landfield, who is involved in Information Systems at the University of Kentucky, says, "Let's all remember that the "family foundation" is a religious group comprised of right wing evangelical 'christian' dominionists."

 Really? Is he talking about me? I'm a Catholic, which makes it theologically impossible for me to be a "dominionist."

Amazing the strange bedfellows that reckless stereotyping can make.

But Landfield, the informationally challenged information systemetizer, goes on: "What Mr. Cothran fails to remember is that there is a separation of church and state in this country, and teaching religion in the public sphere is prohibited. If Mr. Cothran were to get his way and have right wing evangelical 'christian' version of creationism taught and climate science ignored, then I say we should also teach Satanism, Voodoo, Hoodoo, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wiccanism, paganism, and lest I forget, Flying Spaghetti Monstorism in school. After all, isn't that the jist of religious 'freedom'?"

And I recommended teaching religion ... where?

Had Landfield paid attention to the informational aspect of what I said he would have noticed a curious fact: That I not only made no recommendation to teach religion, but made no reference to religion whatsoever. So what exactly is he referring to? It's hard to say.

In pondering the kind of intellectual care Landfield and other commenters on the article take in interpreting what I actually said in the article, I'm seeing some interesting things in our scientific future.

I'm thinking of alchemy and leechcraft here.

My article on the sham approval process of state science standards in today's Herald-Leader

Here is an excerpt of my op-ed on Kentucky's science standards in today's Lexington Herald-Leader:

This is the problem with science education, we are told: students have memorized too many facts. Their heads are bursting with them. There is not enough room in their tiny little brains for an understanding of how these facts should be applied because all the room is currently taken up by facts. There is simply no space in those fact-crowded little heads for scientific applications. 

This may be the first time anyone has argued that the problem with our schools is that students know too much.

Read more here.

New JCPS Slogan: "Not as bad as we used to be, but almost"

Jefferson County Public Schools have reportedly (in stories that were the journalistic equivalent of happy faces) improved under Kentucky's new "Unbridled Learning" assessment system, but not much, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal:

In Jefferson County, 41 percent of the district’s elementary students, 42 percent of middle-schoolers and 52 percent of high-schoolers scored proficient or better in reading, compared with last year’s rates of 42 percent, 38 percent and 51 percent, respectively.

And behind these lackluster numbers was this little tidbit:

Overall, JCPS saw a decline in three areas — elementary reading, middle school science and high school math.

If you can't teach students to read in elementary school, then the future is not bright. And high school math? It's not pretty:

Math proficiency fell slightly, ranging by grade level from 33 to 41 percent proficiency, compared with 33 to 46 percent last year.

In fact, some schools tanked altogether:

All of the district’s high schools scored worse this year in algebra II end-of-course exams. Nine schools — Butler, Doss, Manual, Fern Creek, Iroquois, Male, Pleasure Ridge Park, Southern and Western — posted double-digit declines in the subject.

Double digit declines. And, overall, only 23 percent of schools in Jefferson count scored proficient.

All this after having adopted Common Core standards in 2010. But the important thing is that the school unions are still in control and that teachers colleges are still the gatekeepers of teacher training.

Have a nice day.

Florida governor orders state out of Common Core tests

The War on Knowledge just ran into more opposition.

Just days after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush excoriated opponents of the Common Core for defending ignorance (as opposed to actually implementing it, which is what he recommends), current Florida Gov. Rick Scott issued an executive order calling for the state to lop off the testing tentacle of the Common Core, called "PARCC":

Gov. Rick Scott is directing the state Education Board to withdraw from the national consortium creating tests to accompany the new Common Core State Standards. 

Scott sent a letter to state Board of Education Chairman Gary Chartrand Monday recommending a six-point action plan for pursuing higher standards in education. 

His first recommendation: pull out of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC, and start the competitive bidding process to select the state's new assessment.

Read more here.

HT: Michelle Malkin

Is STEM a SCAM? Are all those predictions of future technology jobs really legit?

There are two kinds of economic obsessions and both involve attempts at prophecy: The first involves predictions that the economic End is Near; the second involves someone telling us what the economy will need in the future. The STEM movement is an example of the latter.

We are now in the midst of the STEM craze. We are told, with religious zeal, that the economy will need STEM jobs in the coming years. Millions of dollars are now being spent to promote STEM education--just like I was told in college that your future job prospects were in learning Fortran and Pascal.

Watch for the 21st century economic equivalent of the 17th century tulip craze in Holland.

In a recent article in IEEE Spectrum (as well as in several other articles), Robert N. Charette points out a few facts about STEM that its advocates aren't talking about:

You must have seen the warning a thousand times: Too few young people study scientific or technical subjects, businesses can’t find enough workers in those fields, and the country’s competitive edge is threatened.

... And yet, alongside such dire projections, you’ll also find reports suggesting just the opposite—that there are more STEM workers than suitable jobs. One study found, for example, that wages for U.S. workers in computer and math fields have largely stagnated since 2000. Even as the Great Recession slowly recedes, STEM workers at every stage of the career pipeline, from freshly minted grads to mid- and late-career Ph.D.s, still struggle to find employment as many companies, including Boeing, IBM , and Symantec , continue to lay off thousands of STEM workers.  

 ... Another surprise was the apparent mismatch between earning a STEM degree and having a STEM job. Of the 7.6 million STEM workers counted by the Commerce Department, only 3.3 million possess STEM degrees. Viewed another way, about 15 million U.S. residents hold at least a bachelor’s degree in a STEM discipline, but three-fourths of them—11.4 million—work outside of STEM. The departure of STEM graduates to other fields starts early. In 2008, the NSF surveyed STEM graduates who’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2006 and 2007. It found that 2 out of 10 were already working in non-STEM fields .And 10 years after receiving a STEM degree, 58 percent of STEM graduates had left the field , according to a 2011 study from Georgetown University. The takeaway? At least in the United States, you don’t need a STEM degree to get a STEM job, and if you do get a degree, you won’t necessarily work in that field after you graduate. If there is in fact a STEM worker shortage, wouldn’t you expect more people with STEM degrees to be filling those jobs? And if many STEM jobs can be filled by people who don’t have STEM degrees, then why the big push to get more students to pursue STEM? 

Read the rest here.

Where is Common Core's thinking skills program?

One of the reasons given by proponents of the Common Core, for not requiring particular content knowledge is that they are teaching kids "critical thinking skills." But merely repeating the phrase doesn't constitute a program. In spite of the fact that Common Core proponents like to shake their pom-poms and cheer it on, they don't seem to even know what "critical thinking skills" means, much less have any actual program to teach it.

The first problem is that Common Core proponents don't seem to even know what "critical thinking skills" are. If you want to talk about "critical thinking skills," you should at least be able to define what they are. In all the reading of done on Common Core, I can find a single definition of the term.

You can require that students exercise thinking skills, but how are they going to be able to actually employ them if they never learn them? And how are they going to learn them unless there is some kind of systematic program to teach it to them?

A case in point is a recent post from Susan Weston at the Prichard Committee, who is running a series of posts on the Common Core standards. In her most recent post, she reblogs Stu Silberman's post in Education Week on three of the Common Core reading standards.

One of them reads: "Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, including the validity of the reasoning as well as the relevance and sufficiency of the evidence."

Sounds great, doesn't it?

Here is Silberman, commenting on this section:

With a parent or citizen audience, I'd emphasize two points. 

First, Standard 8 is my very favorite part of the whole Common Core process, because it asks students to track the evidence and check whether each author's positions are well grounded in reliable facts and sensible reasoning. To me, that sounds like the basics of citizenship preparation, and close to the root of why America has public schools. 

And second, Standard 8 is my inspiration for this set of blog posts. For those who are wary about Common Core, I urge them to start by reading Common Core. If you think they're wrong for the kids of your state, say which part you think is wrong, quoting from the actual text. Wrestle the real document and the real evidence, and don't settle for anyone else's summary.

Okay, fine. So maybe Stu or Susan can tell me how the Common Core is going to teach this ability to "delineate and evaluate" an argument? How is a student going to learn how to "check whether each author's positions are well grounded in ... sensible reasoning." And what is "sensible reasoning"? Most importantly, where in the standards does it outline the method by which it is going to teach students how to determine "validity"?

There are certain specific things a student has to know in order to deter the validity of an argument. In categorical reasoning, one has to know how many terms an argument has and that they are not equivocal. He has to know the four kinds of logical statements and whether the terms are distributed in each subject and predicate. He then has to know the rules for validity and be able to apply them to actual arguments.

If the reasoning is hypothetical, then he has to know, given the particular structure of the argument, which term (the antecedent or consequent) he can affirm or deny in order to derive the correct conclusion.

Where in the standards are these things required of students so that they would actually have the capability to determine the validity of an argument? Where is this process taught to teachers who will be implementing the standards? And is it reasonable to expect a K-5 student to be able to do this, much less a 6-12th grade student who has never had any training in logic?

The only way to determine validity of an argument is to use logic, and no mention is made in the standards of whether or how it is going to be taught. Unless there is some procedure for teaching students how to actually determine validity of arguments, then all the talk about "validity" is meaningless and ineffectual.

War on Knowledge to be discussed on Mike Allen Show today

I will be appearing on the Mike Allen Show on Real Life Radio 1380 in Lexington, KY today at 5:00 est to discuss the War on Knowledge.

As state funding for KY schools declines, performance improves

The announcement by Kentucky education officials yesterday of alleged improvements in the state's school system over the last few years may be the fulfillment of the prophecy of a famous Kentuckian.

After I introduced Wendell Berry last year at the CiRCE Institute Padeia Prize banquet, he said, "I think our education system is too big to fail, but I also think it's too big to fix—without a lot less money. Perhaps poverty will do them some good."

With this in mind, did anyone happen to notice that the day after all these great improvements in Kentucky schools since 2010 were announced (reduction in dropout rates, greater college and career readiness), the Lexington Herald-Leader, in an impeccably-timed editorial today, complained about the decline in state education funding since 2008?

Now it's rather humorous that the Herald-Leader editors would be complaining about something having a negative effect that actually had a direct correlation with education improvement!

And furthermore we could give this correlation scientific legitimacy by merely conferring an acronym on it and using scientific lingo to describe it. Let's call it the FREIE (The Funding Reduction Education Improvement Effect) which represents the research-based conclusion of the correlation which we observe in the data indicating the need for a repurposing of our cognitive presumptions given the fact that decreases in education expenditures seem to contribute to the conclusion that educational infrastructures problematize the cognitive outcome that increases in expenditure generate critical proficiencies.

(Why is it that I feel like taking a shower after I say something like that?)

Think about it: If a decline in educational funding of ten percent correlates with the kind of improvement Kentucky officials are now claiming, just imagine how much Kentucky schools could be improved by, say, a 20 percent or even 30 percent funding cut.

It's worth a try.

The next battle in the academic left's War on Knowledge: Social studies standards

Another tentacle has reportedly grown on the Common Core monster that promises to suck even more knowledge out of the minds of your children.

We go now to Frederick M. Hess at the Enterprise Institute for an update:

Yesterday, on Constitution Day, a coalition of social studies organizations issued their “College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for State Social Studies Standards.” One of the partner organizations was the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools co-chaired by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. Now, the exercise had more than a little irony, given that the organizations went out of their way to ensure that these “social studies standards” make no mention of the U.S. Constitution—or other historical events, dates, or persons. 

Susan Griffin, executive director of the National Council of Social Studies (NCSS), explained, “Many state standards in social studies are overwhelmed with lists of dates, places and names to memorize – information students quickly forget.” Instead, she said, the new framework would help states establish “fewer, higher, and clearer standards for instruction in civics, economics, geography, and history,” the standards emphasize “critical thinking, collaboration, and inquiry.” Without delving into what students should actually know, the new C3 framework, explains an accompanying fact sheet, “Intentionally envisions social studies instruction as an inquiry arc of interlocking and mutually reinforcing elements that speak to the intersection of ideas and learners.” 

... 

Frederick? Frederick? Are you still there? Well, we've lost Frederick. But you can get the rest of his report on the new social studies standards here.

I have said before that the people who talk the most about "critical thinking skills" are the least able to explain exactly what they are. But we may now have a breakthrough.

What the permissivist educational establishment appears to mean by "critical thinking skills" is the process of eliminating content knowledge from the minds of children. So when you hear them using contentless expressions such as "critical thinking, collaboration, and inquiry," pack up the minivan and flee to the hills before your children's minds are turned into mush by the Common Core monster.

BREAKING NEWS: Give up your guns, but ignore our violent programming

BLANDERSON STUPOR: We interrupt this program to bring you a special report wherein we tell you about the recent shooting in the naval yard in Washington, D.C. and lecture everybody about how we need new laws banning guns in order to eliminate violence about which we are very schocked and appalled.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled violent programming which we vehemently deny has anything to do with glorifying and promoting the violence about which we profess to be shocked and appalled (largely because it would cost us money).

Thank you.

In Defense of Facts: Students know too much, say science standards advocates

While most of us think that it is ignorance that needs to be stamped out, advocates of Kentucky's new unapproved and forcibly implemented science standards are targeting ... knowledge.

Just take a gander at the responses to my opinion piece in the Louisville Courier-Journal which were published on Monday. According to Brad Matthews, former director of curriculum and assessment for the Jefferson County Public Schools, one reason we need these unapproved and forcibly implement standards is to extirpate that bane of all modern permissivist educators: memorization.

"Science education has moved away from the memorization of many facts," says Matthews, "and toward understanding how the laws and principles of science are applied."

That's right: students have memorized too many facts. Their heads are bursting with scientific facts. There is not enough room in their tiny little brains for an understanding of how these facts should be applied because all the room us currently taken up by scientific facts which these students have memorized. There is simply no space in those fact-crowded little heads for scientific concepts.

The solution is obvious to people like Matthews: clear all that knowledge out of there so they will be able to apply the knowledge they will no longer have under these standards.

Just check out some of those Jefferson County schools Matthews had a hand in overseeing and you'll see the extent to which kids are overstuffed with memorized factual knowledge.

What exactly is it that modern educators have against memorized knowledge of facts? And why is it that they are always pitting facts against application and concepts? Is the possession of memorized facts really inconsistent with an ability to apply scientific procedures and an understanding of scientific ideas?

Since we're now abandoning memorization, we can apparently look forward to the prospect of Kentucky students knowing fewer facts than ever before.

What a relief.

Perpetual Childhood: Are parents too involved in the lives of their grown children?

When I was in high school, there was a very popular surfing movie called, "Endless Summer." It was about surfers who traveled the world in perpetual pursuit of the perfect wave. But what our children can now look forward to, apparently, is "Endless Childhood."

I heard somewhere recently (NPR, I think) that college professors are getting more and more calls from the parents of their students who are dissatisfied by the grades they [their children] are receiving or the nature of instruction and so forth. And the first thought I have, after hearing of this, is to ponder just how perpetually adolescent our culture has become that a person needs the assistance of his parents into adulthood.

By the time a person has graduated from college, he should be able to assist his parents, his parents should not be having to assist him. At bottom, he should not have to have his parents still managing his affairs.

But  here is John Hayword, waxing anxious on a recent Wall Street Journal article on parental involvement in the employment life of their grown children, including the interview and recruitment process and the process of advancement:

I don’t want to come off like an old fuddy-duddy here, but it seems to me that some of the traits employers value – independence, resourcefulness, initiative – are undermined by bringing parents into the office, not to mention involving them in job interviews. I’m a big proponent of the importance of family, and its value for putting young people on the road to success, but at some point you’ve got to leave the nest.  

It’s also not a good idea to encourage the new social trend of extended adolescence. The current American culture is quite impatient with childhood - they’re working on sex-ed classes for five-year-olds in Chicago – but it wants to drag adolescence out as long as possible. The life of the college student will now extend into the early years of career life, where company functions increasingly resemble PTA meetings. Couple this with the growing trend of young people living with their parents for an uncomfortably long time, and it’s getting hard to see where “adulthood” really begins.

It will be interesting to see, in modern culture, just how long we can extend childhood.