Science, the arts, and creativity

'Tis the season for school budget votes, when school districts find out how much they're going to have to cut from the instructional program, and younger, low-seniority teachers find out if they're actually going to have a job in September.

It's a fraught time of year for anyone in education, and I say that even though it's been a very long time since I've had to worry about my job, and as a "core teacher" (more about that in a moment) I've never had any concerns about my subject being cut.  But when I see the effect this has on other teachers and the morale of the school in general, it breaks my heart.

What is even more troubling is the distinction being made between "core" classes and electives, sometimes called "specials."  The attitude is that the "core" -- English, Social Studies, Math, and Science/Technology -- is somehow more important than the other classes.  And calling the other classes "specials" is disingenuous at best; to quote Eric Idle's character in Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, "You're not foolin' anyone, you know."  Whenever there are budget cuts, the "specials" are the first to go.  The message is that we can do without art and music and other electives, but everything else is sacrosanct.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mukul urp, CLASSROOM, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's tragic about this is that the opposite is apparently closer to the truth.  Educational researcher Andreas Schleicher just addressed the UK House of Commons last week to bring to light this very issue -- that not only are the arts and music and so on critical because they're creative and fun and are often the high point of students' days, but they give students essential skills for flourishing in today's job market.  And since that's ordinarily the one thing the politicians accuse schools of failing at, this got some people to sit up and take note.

"I would say, in the fourth industrial revolution, arts may become more important than maths," Schleicher said.  "We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite...  the true ‘hard skills’ will be your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence and your resilience."

Schleicher also spoke out against the drill-and-test mode that is becoming the norm in the United States, and apparently in the UK as well.  He suggests that our desperation to convert everything into numbers -- what the educational policy wonks call "measurable outcomes" -- has led us to emphasize the subjects in which that's easier.  Math and science, especially, can be focused on "getting the right answer," giving you an easy metric to measure success -- if that's the kind of success you're looking for.

"When you look at the types of tasks that British students are doing better [than other countries], they are more those that are associated with the past than the future – the kind of things that are easy to teach and easy to test," Schleicher said.  "It is precisely those things that are easy to digitise...  [But] the modern world doesn’t reward you for what you know, but for what you can do with what you know."

In other words, the creativity you can bring to bear upon a problem, and your ability to see connections in disparate realms.  "Lateral thinking," it's often called.  But this is the kind of thing we educators usually fail to teach -- because it's hard to incorporate into your typical lesson, and hard to measure.  Much simpler just to keep students thinking inside the box, thinking that every problem has exactly one right answer, and (to quote another brilliant educational researcher, Sir Ken Robinson), "It's at the back of the book.  But don't look."

The saddest part, for me as a science educator, is that science itself is not usually taught as a creative endeavor.  In many classrooms, science is a list of vocabulary words and standardized solution methods, both of which could be memorized and regurgitated without any real understanding taking place.  But the truth is, the best science is highly creative, and requires a leap, questioning assumptions and looking at every piece of our understanding in the light of curiosity and exploration.

A classic example is Albert Einstein.  Before Einstein's time, physicists had been puzzled that all the experiments done to determine the speed of light found that it was constant -- that its speed didn't vary depending on whether you were moving away from or toward the light source.  How on earth could that be?  No other wave or particle acted that way.  So they came up with convoluted ways around what they referred to as "the problem of the constancy of the speed of light."

Einstein turned the whole thing on its head by saying, "What if it's not a problem, but simply inherent in the behavior of light itself?"  So he started from the assumption that light's speed is constant, in every frame of reference, even if you were heading toward the light source at 99% of the speed of light.

The result?  The Special Theory of Relativity, and the opening up of a whole new realm of physics.

To quote Arthur Schopenhauer: "Talent hits a target no one else can hit.  Genius hits a target no one else can see."

Hard to see how today's educational system, with its mania for the memorize-and-test model, will produce the next generation's Einstein.  The next generation's Einstein will be lucky if (s)he gets out of school with an intact sense of creativity and curiosity.

So Schleicher is exactly right.  We should be increasing arts and music education in schools, not cutting it.  "STEM" curricula and other "core" subjects are important, don't get me wrong; but the emphasis they get is seriously unbalanced.  And for heaven's sake, let's stop considering something real if we can test it and measure it.  I'll end with another quote, this one from writer, researcher, and professor Robert I. Sutton: "To foster creativity, you must reward success and failure equally, and punish inactivity."

***********************************

In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

The war over tenure

I know how to fix the educational system.

It's so simple, I can even put it in a bulleted-list form.  Here's what you do:

• Shorten the time between teaching the material and giving the test.
• No make-ups or reteaching allowed.  If the kid doesn't get it the first time, (s)he deserves to fail.
• A student's progress will be measured by standardized, quantifiable assessments only.
• If a student fails the test for two units in a row, (s)he will be required to drop the course.
• The teacher has the last word about whether a student is dropped.
• Studies show that between 1-3% of students are "grossly stupid."  Because this is clearly the students' fault, and is unremediable, they will be expelled from school.

Pissed off yet?  I hope so.  But you might want to consider that all I did was to take the results of last week's alteration in teacher-tenure law in California, and stepped it down from teachers and administrators to students and teachers.

Okay, I know that I might not have played fair, and that the comparison between teachers and students is a bit of a false analogy.  But consider what the core of the changes have accomplished; shifting the balance of power entirely into the hands of administrators, ramping up the anxiety (especially for new teachers and teachers in poor schools), and gauging effectiveness solely by numerical measures that consider nothing but the all-powerful standardized test.  If we really did do something analogous in our classrooms, parents would rightfully be howling for blood.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But do it to teachers, and a lot of people just nod and smile.  Damn slacker teachers, getting union protection even if they're incompetent, plus two months off in the summer.  'bout time we tighten the screws, hold them accountable for the job they're (not) doing.  Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of the Washington D.C. schools, was thrilled by the ruling, and said, "The union's job is to protect the rights, privileges, and pay of their members.  They want their members to be able to keep their jobs regardless, and what this judge is saying is that we have to look out for the interests of children, first and foremost -- that we have to ensure that there's a high quality teacher in front of every child every single day."

Because clearly, teachers themselves have no particular concern about the interests of students.

I've been a teacher for 27 years, and yes, I've met some terrible ones.  But even the judge in the California case, Los Angeles County Judge Rolf Treu, says that "grossly incompetent" teachers account for only 1-3% of the teachers out there.  So how do you fix the problem?  Surely it's not by removing the legal right to due process from all teachers.  Put simply, you do not create good teachers by firing bad ones.

In my own school system, we've had staff cuts, increasing class sizes, and reduced budgets for supplies, equipment, and textbooks for the last ten years in a row.  We've had a steady decrease in instructional time -- this year, we've had once-a-month half-day "staff development days" that have accomplished nothing worth the loss of student contact time, not to mention foolishness like the state-mandated "field tests" that pull kids out of their classes for several periods in a row to take a pilot exam simply because the Department of Education wants more numbers to crunch.  It seems like on the middle and elementary school level, they're having some sort of standardized test every other week.  And now we're basing teachers' end-of-the-year score on these metrics, despite its being demonstrated over and over again that standardized test scores are inaccurate measures of understanding, and that other factors outside of teachers' control can have as big an effect as what happens in the classroom (most importantly, poverty, which no one wants to talk about).

Couple that with the lack of trust that upper administration, and society as a whole, has for teachers.  I know that I've said it before, but it's worth a reminder: did you know that in New York State, teachers are not allowed to grade their own final exams, because the NYSED is so afraid we'll cheat?  In several classes I teach, I've had to go to an all multiple-choice format for the final, because to do otherwise would require my training another teacher in the curriculum I teach so that (s)he could grade the exam fairly.

So: do more with less.  Less money, less supplies, less time.  Increase the penalty for failure to meet the benchmarks, up to and including losing your job.  Remove the protection of due process for all teachers, and simultaneously treat them with distrust and suspicion, so as to create a work environment that has maximal risk and maximal stress.

Yup, that should work just fine.

The cynical side of me is becoming convinced that these people want public schools to fail -- that the biggest social experiment the world has ever seen, that all children can and should receive a broad education in liberal arts and sciences, should be replaced by a merit-based system of charter schools.  It boils down to "break the system to show that it's broken."

Understand me: I'm not in favor of protecting bad teachers.  The whole "rubber room" phenomenon is idiotic.  For the truly incompetent -- and I think that even 1% is a high estimate for that category -- the road to dismissal should be short.  Just as with other professions, there are some people who simply shouldn't be teachers.

But for the rest, and especially for those teachers who are struggling, how about these suggestions, to counterbalance the tongue-in-cheek ones I started with?

• Increase the support that teachers get, and not just by useless "staff development."  Have young teachers, or those who are struggling, mentored by excellent educators.  And... pay those mentors well for their time and expertise.
• Use metrics other than standardized tests for measuring teacher effectiveness.  Especially in the upper grades, those should include evaluations by students.  After all, they're the clientele -- they know best of all if a teacher is doing his or her job well.  And in my experience, students are, for the most part, fair and articulate evaluators.
• Likewise, evaluate students using something other than corporate-developed standardized tests.  Teachers supposed to be the experts in instruction and assessment; let them do their jobs.
• Revise the current school funding system, that has bled school districts dry, resulting in staff cuts, programatic losses, and bigger class sizes.
• Trust that, for the most part, teachers know what they're doing.  Let's turn Judge Treu's numbers around; if 3% of teachers are incompetent, then 97% are doing their job in a competent fashion.  Doesn't sound so bad if you put it that way, does it?

I know that the war isn't over yet, not by a longshot.  The unions are already challenging the California ruling, and the battleground is being set in other states.  But we need to think through what we're doing, here, because the stakes we are playing for are the highest of all: the futures of our children.

Fiddling while the education system burns

It's late February, and if you're a teacher, you know what that means:

Time to start worrying if you'll have a job next year.

In my own school district, we're just starting to see the proposed cuts being announced.  And while out of respect to my friends and colleagues whose jobs are on the line I won't give any details about what's come out thus far, I will say: it ain't gonna be pretty.

The problem is, it hasn't been pretty for years.  This is the seventh year in a row that my little upstate New York school district has had major staffing cuts.  We've seen classes dropped, curriculum lost.  Veteran teachers are being reduced to half-time, are teaching in two different buildings, are teaching four and five different subjects, are teaching classrooms in which every available seat is occupied.  Other, less fortunate individuals have simply been axed.  And every year we're told that the administration is really, really sorry about all of this, that they and the School Board and the Board of Regents and the State Department of Education have the students' interest in mind and are doing their level best to Keep Excellence in Education.

When are we, as a nation, going to wake up and point this out as the falsehood it is?

Oh, it's not that any of them are setting out to harm children; but if that's the ultimate outcome, does that really matter?  Shouldn't someone who is responsible for the oversight of education recognize this, and have the balls to point it out?  And, perhaps, do something about it?  But no; we're stuck with the same antiquated system of school funding, that places a stranglehold on poor and rural schools, that puts local school boards in the Hobson's choice of either raising property taxes or else cutting school staffing to the bone.

And school boards are elected positions, and the votes come from residents, who pay property taxes.  Guess how the decision almost always plays out?

The problem is that this kind of thinking -- today's dollar, today's tax increase, today's elementary school student -- ignores the fact that schools represent an investment in the future.  We don't know yet which third-grader is going to be the next Krishna Shenoy, finding a way to give quadriplegics the ability to walk again.  Which will be a Jocelyn Brown, who developed a device to help infants with compromised respiratory systems to breathe.  Who could be a Paige Cramer, who discovered that an old cancer drug could be used to ameliorate the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's.

And we're going to need the Shenoys, the Browns, the Cramers.  As a society -- and, perhaps, as a species -- we will face in the next couple of decades some of the most significant challenges we have ever seen.  Type-2 diabetes is rising so fast worldwide that doctors are calling it an "epidemic."  The effects of anthropogenic climate change are being felt across the globe.  (And sorry, deniers; it is happening, and it is anthropogenic.  The US National Academy of Sciences and the UK Royal Society issued a joint paper just yesterday that was unequivocal.  Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, said, "We have enough evidence to warrant action being taken on climate change; it is now time for the public debate to move forward to discuss what we can do to limit the impact on our lives and those of future generations.")  Supplies of fresh water and clean air are imperiled; we are using fossil fuels and other resources at a rate that is unsustainable.

And what are our politicians focusing on?  Here in the US, state legislators are monkeying around with bills in twelve states that are versions of the "Turn Away the Gays" bill that was just vetoed in Arizona.  Think about it; our elected officials think that reenacting the Jim Crow laws is a higher priority than assuring that our children receive a solid education. 

This is worse than fiddling while Rome burns.  This is having a Ku Klux Klan meeting while Rome burns.

The problem is, much of the benefit from education is (1) unquantifiable, and (2) realized only in the future.  So, to our legislators, and (unfortunately) to many voters, it doesn't exist.  If you can't show that the damage being done here and now by funding cuts to schools is causing a drop in the Almighty Standardized Test Scores, then we must be doing just fine.  Never mind the larger class sizes; never mind the loss of electives, music, and the arts.  Never mind the demoralized teachers who are right now reconsidering their choice of a career.  Never mind the students who, if you don't afford them the opportunity for learning and expanding their horizons, will never accomplish what they could have accomplished, for their own good and for the good of humanity.

[image from a ca. 1899 postcard, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

For some, that's not an immediate enough problem to warrant doing anything about it.  Easier to keep doing what we've always done, figuring that we'll find our way forward somehow.  But remember; like canoes, societies have tipping points.  They don't often flip as spectacularly as canoes do, which means that we can pass the point of no return without being aware of it.  The signs of an incipient crash are already here; failing inner-city schools, poor rural school districts that are merging in order to survive or else going bankrupt, overcrowded classrooms with nothing to offer but the bare-bones graduation requirements.  We have to ask, as a society, if we are willing to accept this -- seeing a whole generation growing up without the skills, knowledge, enrichment, creativity, and critical thinking ability that will be needed to lead us forward.

If the answer is no, and yet we fail to act, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Teacher scores and error bars

One of the first rules of handling data that students learn in science classes is the concept of "significant figures."  Although the rules for determining whether a particular digit in a measurement or calculation is significant (i.e. reliably accurate) are a little complicated, the whole idea boils down to a simplistic concept:

When you do a calculation that combines various pieces of measured data, the result cannot be any more accurate than the least accurate piece of data that went into the calculation.

It's why you see "error bars" around data points in scientific papers.  You have to keep in mind how precise the data is, so that when you combine different measurements, you know how accurate the result is.  And the difficulty is that error is cumulative; the more pieces of data you combine, the greater the cumulative error becomes, and the lower the confidence that the outcome is actually right.

Which brings me to how teachers' grades are being calculated in New York state.

Our grades this year are a composite of three measures.  60% of our grade comes from numerical scores assigned by our principal from classroom observations; 40% comes from the outcome of our students' performance on tests (20% each from two different sets of tests).  This year, my two blocks of twenty percentage points each came from my AP Biology exam results, and the total of my student's results on my in-class final exams.  So, here are my results:

I got 60/60 on classroom observations.  I got 20/20 on my AP Biology exam results, which is mystifying for two reasons: (1) the exam itself was a poorly-designed exercise in frustration, as I described in a previous blog post; and (2) three of my 27 students got a 2 on the exam, which is below the benchmark, so my score should have been knocked down a peg because of that.

I got a 10/20 on my in-class final exam results.

Why?  A combination of reasons.  The state, in their desperation to pretend that all outcomes are quantifiable, required that for the purposes of calculating our "teacher grade," the exit exam score had to be compared to a "pre-test."  My pre-test, in AP Biology, was the combination of the students' Regents (Introductory) Biology and Regents Chemistry final exams -- both markedly easier tests.  Every student in my class scored below their pre-test score on my rigorous, college-level final, so in the state's eyes it looks like the year they spent in my class actively made them stupider.

I also got graded down because of the three students in my elective who chose not to take the final exam.  You might ask yourself why the teacher should be blamed for a student's choice to skip the day of the final.  The state has a ready answer: "It is the teacher's responsibility to make certain that all students complete the requirements of the course."  (That's a direct quote, folks.)

So, my overall grade this year is a 90, which you'd think I'd be pretty pleased with.  Actually, I'm not, because my grade -- supposedly, a measure of my effectiveness as a teacher -- isn't a 90 at all.  What should it be, then?  Damned if I know.  We've combined three measurements to get that score that were all measuring different things, at different accuracies.

Remember error bars?

Were my classroom observation scores accurate?  I'd say so, and I'm not just saying that because I scored well.  The principal I work for is outstanding, and has a real sense of what good classroom teaching is.  Of the three measures, I'd say that this is the one I'm the most confident of.

How about the 40% that came from test scores?  Honestly, I'd say that number has a wobble factor of at least ten points either way.  In part, the test score outcomes are due to my effectiveness as a teacher; it'd be a sad state of affairs if how my students performed had nothing to do with me at all.  But are there other factors involved?

Of course.  On the plus side, there's the hard work the students put in.  Dedication to a class they've enjoyed.  Good study skills.  Raw intelligence.

On the minus side, there's poverty.  Cognitive disabilities.  Lack of parental support.  Bad attitude.  Frustration.  Laziness. 

To name a few.

So, really, how confident are you that my grade of 90 is actually a reflection of my effectiveness as a teacher?  Because that confidence can't be any higher than the least accurate measure that went into calculating it.

The funny thing is, this statistical concept is one that is taught in every Educational Statistics class in the world, and yet the powers-that-be in the State Department of Education have been completely unresponsive to claims that the way they're handling numbers is spurious.  Of course, I don't know why we should expect any different; the way they handle scaling final exams in New York state is also spurious, and they have feigned deafness to objections from teachers on that count, too.

As an example, on the state biology final, students have consistently needed to get 46% of the answers correct to score a scaled score of 65 [passing], while on the physics exam, the fraction of correct answers students need to score a 65 has varied from 59% to 67%.  Yes, that's correct; there have been years where exam scores in physics have been scaled downward.  When questioned about how this can possibly be fair, Carl Preske, Education Specialist at the New York State Department of Education, responded (this is a direct quote):

I promised myself that I would not join in any discussion of negative curve and the quality of the questions.  So much for promises, unless you personally have a degree in tests and measurements  I doubt that you have the expertise that the twenty teachers who have worked on each question.  Secondly if you lack a degree in psychometrics than [sic] comments on negative curves are useless. That being said,  each subject area established their own cut points for 65 and 85 more than 10 years ago: we (those constructing the physics exam) have the advantage of having a much larger number of difficult questions to place on each exam than does Chemistry  and with that greater number of difficult questions we are able to avoid what you prefer to call a negative.  Since we have about 20-25 questions above the 65 cut point we are able to stretch out the top 35 scaled credits,  Chemistry has between12 and 18 questions above the cut point over which they may scale the 35 credits.   If you wish to remove the "negative curve" than [sic] please find a way to generate 20 difficult questions to give to the test writing group each year.

Well, that was lucid.

So, we're basing teachers' scores on a combination of metrics based on the scaled scores of flawed tests.

Remember the idea of error being cumulative?  ("Your score is a 90!  ± 50 points!")

Now, you may be thinking, what real difference does a teacher's score make?  How can it be used against them?  My own opinion is that we are, country-wide, moving toward using teachers' end-of-the year scores for purposes of awarding (or revoking) tenure, job retention, and (ultimately) raises and salary.  None of that has happened yet.  But already, these scores are being considered reliable enough that they are being used as a criterion for the awarding grant money.  I just saw last week an offer of research grant money that was open to teachers -- but only if you were considered "Highly Effective," that is, you scored a 91 or higher for the year.

That's right, folks.  If I'd gotten one point higher, I would be able to apply for a four-year research grant worth $15,000/year.  But I'm only "Effective," not "Highly Effective," so there you are.

The whole thing is intensely frustrating, because it seems like all of the rank-and-file teachers grasp the problem with this immediately, and none of the higher-ups in the State Department of Education are even willing to admit that what they're doing is statistically invalid.  Their attitude seems to be that if it can be converted to numbers, it's real.  And if it's real, it can be converted to numbers.

Oh, and if it can be converted to numbers, it's valid.  Right?

Of course right.

Me, I'm just going to keep loping along doing what I've always done, teacher score be damned.  I told a colleague this year that I didn't care what I got as long as it was above a 65, because if I "failed" I'd have to do more paperwork, which makes me sound like one of my less-motivated students.  But I know that what I do in the classroom works; I know I'm effective.  Whether I got a 90, or a 100, or a 72, means absolutely nothing, neither in the statistical sense nor in any other sense.  What we do as teachers has an inherently unquantifiable aspect to it.  How can you measure students' excitement?  Or creativity?  Or the sense of wonder they get at learning about the world?  Or the moment that a kid decides, "I love this subject.  I want to spend the rest of my life doing this?"

But the b-b stackers in the state capitol don't, apparently, recognize any of that as valuable.  It's a good thing that most of us teachers still do.

Welcoming in the witch doctors

Whenever I think that the battle over teaching creationism in the public schools can't get any more bizarre, it does.

The smarter anti-science types -- and I know that may sound like a bit of an oxymoron, so you'll just have to believe me that there is a spectrum -- are people like Michael Behe, who adopt a bait-and-switch technique to claim that because there are facets of evolutionary biology that haven't yet been explained, the whole thing is suspect.  These folks write massive tomes with names that seem to indicate that there's all of this doubt about the mechanisms of evolution, often invoking the name of Charles Darwin in the title, such as Darwin's Dilemma or Darwin's Confusion or Darwin Scratching His Head In Puzzlement or Darwin Sits There With A Dumb Look On His Face (Behe's contribution was Darwin's Black Box).  After stating that we still don't understand everything, as if this wasn't true of every scientific field, they just sit down and say, "Ha.  We win," despite the fact that scientists do understand most of these systems pretty well.  In that way, they're a little like Bill O'Reilly.

Of course, just saying "You don't know about that" never stops scientists; finding out about things they don't yet know is what science is.

Then, you have your Wendy Wright-style creationist.  Wright, you might know, is the former president of Concerned Women of America, who engaged in a "debate" with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins that caused many of us to repeatedly slam our heads into a wall.  Wright's technique was simply to stonewall.  It's the creationist version of "la-la-la-la-la, not listening."

Dawkins, I think, showed admirable restraint by not screaming "ARE YOU A MORON?  OR WHAT?" at her.

This week, however, we saw a new technique, which had the effect of silencing me entirely out of utter bafflement.

You have probably heard about the Louisiana Science Education Act, a piece of legislation that was passed in 2008 and which allows teachers to use "supplemental materials that challenge existing science" in their classrooms.  While it never explicitly mentions evolution, it is pretty clear to its opponents that this was the intent (with climate change being a secondary target).  Every year since its passage, there have been attempts to repeal it, with the most recent failing this month.  Governor Bobby Jindal, who signed the legislation into law, defended the LSEA as follows:

We have what’s called the Science Education Act that says if a teacher wants to supplement those materials, if the school board’s OK with that, if the state school board’s OK with that, they can supplement those materials.  I’ve got no problem if a school board, a local school board, says we want to teach our kids about creationism, that some people have these beliefs as well.  Let’s teach them about intelligent design. I think teach them the best science.

But even this -- the labeling of creationism and intelligent design as "the best science," as if this was actually what scientists think -- falls short of what happened in the Louisiana legislature last week.  In the hearings on the LSEA (which ultimately resulted in its being upheld), Senator Elbert Guillory (R-Opelousas) stated that we needed the LSEA in place so that science teachers could teach...

... about witch doctors.

I couldn't make this up if I tried.  Here's the exact quote:

I'm concerned that we might shut off the presentation of ideas... by declaring one science, or another as pseudoscience...  I can tell you about my experience with a doctor, this doctor practiced in an open circle in a dusty spot, he wore no shoes, was semi-clothed, used a lot of bones that he threw around.  I bet that all of us would agree that his science is a pseudoscience, that we would not have respect for his science and the practice of his science.  That would concern me, because if we were able to declare what I have verified as something that has some validity to it, I mean, the stuff the man told me about my history... If I closed my mind when I saw this man in the dust throwing some bones on the ground, semi-clothed, if I had just closed him off, said, 'That's not science.  I'm not gonna see this doctor,' I would have shut off a very good experience for myself, and actually would not have known some things I needed to do when I got home to see my doctor.

Right.  Okay.  What?

Let me get this straight, Senator Guillory; you want the LSEA in place so that when I teach human physiology in my AP Biology class, I can say things like, "When someone is diagnosed with diabetes, it is critical that they receive insulin injections to bring their blood sugar back down.  Or else they could just throw around some bones, which should accomplish the same thing."

Now, I suspect that Senator Guillory was being disingenuous, here; it's pretty common to characterize the battle as "teach the controversy," as if there is a controversy about evolution outside of religious circles.  More than once I've heard proponents of creationism and ID argue that "all we want to do is teach students to think critically about science by presenting them with other viewpoints."  It may be that the whole witch doctor thing that Guillory was describing was a feint, a way to claim that the kerfuffle over science education was about open-mindedness (or multiculturalism) and not about religion.

On the other hand, maybe he's just a loon.  I dunno.

In any case, it illustrates something that I've commented upon before in this blog; these people are damn near impossible to argue with.  They always have a ready answer, even if that answer makes no sense whatsoever.

It reminds me of a quote -- variously attributed, but which seems to come originally from Christopher Hitchens -- that seems a fitting place to end.

"You can't reason yourself out of a position that you didn't reason yourself into."

The new, eviscerated AP Biology exam

You would think that, after spending 26 years as an educator, I would have figured out that whenever an educational oversight group says, "We are restructuring and reconfiguring this, for sound pedagogical reasons, in order to improve it," this really means, "We are going to scramble this for no good reason whatsoever, and the result will be something far worse than what you started with."

It happened with the New York State Regents Examinations, which (for those of you who do not live in New York) are the high-school-level course exit exams.  The rallying cry was "Raising the Bar," which makes it a little hard to explain why the biological sciences Regents examination is now so easy that it can be passed by anyone who has three working brain cells.  This exam was passed by a student who, on a quiz on human anatomy, incorrectly labeled the "anus" as being on the left arm.

Oh, but there was one major outcome of the exam restructuring: they changed the name of the course from "Regents Biology" to "Regents Living Environment," which raises the bar by virtue of having more letters.

So, when the College Board decided to restructure the curriculum and examination for AP Biology -- a course I've taught for twenty years -- I should have expected the same to happen.  Here's their rationale, as per the 2011 announcement of the planned changes on the College Board website:

“The revisions were enacted to address a challenging situation in science education at a critical juncture for American competitiveness,” said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board. “The body of scientific knowledge is constantly expanding. The revisions will help science educators ensure that their instruction is fresh and current and that students develop not just a solid knowledge of the facts but also the ability to practice science and think critically about scientific issues.”

The revised AP Biology course and exam align with the knowledge and skills that many rigorous college-level introductory biology courses now seek to nurture, emphasizing the development of scientific inquiry and reasoning skills. Lab work is a critical component of the course, requiring students to master such skills as posing questions; collecting, analyzing and evaluating data; connecting fundamental concepts; and then defending their conclusions based on experiments.

“The revised course objectives will enable teachers and students to explore key topics in depth and will help students learn to reason with the rigor and objectivity of scientists,” said Trevor Packer, vice president of the Advanced Placement Program at the College Board.

So, I dutifully resubmitted my curriculum, and had it approved by the powers-that-be at the AP Central.  "How different can the exam be?" I thought.  "Biology is what biology is; the concepts are the same.  I already teach a rigorous course, that helps students to draw connections between disparate fields of science, that has an emphasis on application, reasoning, and synthesis, and that uses a strong lab component.  I'm told every year by students returning to visit from college that my class was a good preparation for college-level science.  It will be fine."

Optimism is a losing proposition, sometimes.

My students sat for the exam on Monday.  As you are undoubtedly predicting by now, I was not only wrong, I was so far wrong that it has made me question whether I should even offer this course next year.

The New and Improved AP Biology exam -- of which I only ever get to see the free-response section, the multiple choice section is hardly ever released to teachers for analysis -- was, in my opinion, a vague, confusing muddle that left students wondering, "is that all they're looking for?"  Here are four examples, which I will describe rather than quote in their entirety, for the sake of brevity:

1) A question in which fruit flies are placed in a "choice chamber" and given the choice of flying toward a dry cotton ball or one soaked in glucose solution.  Students are asked to "predict the distribution of the flies after ten minutes, and justify your prediction."  (As a student said to me after the exam, "A central principle of the animal world is that 'some food is better than no food.'")

2)  A question showing a "simplified carbon cycle" that looked, more or less, like this (but without the words in blue):

Students had to correctly label the arrows with "photosynthesis" and "respiration," and state that an example of an organism that does both processes is "a plant."

For reference, the unsimplified carbon cycle I use in my class is shown below:

3)  A question regarding the evolution of the earliest amphibians (363 million years ago) from lobe-finned fish (observed in rocks that are 380 million years old), that asked students to predict when, in geological history, you would might find fossils of the transitional species between the two groups.

4)  A question describing an experiment in which rats are given alcohol, and it is found that their urine output increases over rats that are given water.  Students were asked to "pose one scientific question that the researchers were most likely investigating with this experiment" and then "describe the effect of ethyl alcohol on urine production."

And so on.

Understandably, my students were pretty frustrated by gearing up for an examination that turned out to have been eviscerated of virtually all of its technical content.  And when you have a bunch of students who are pissed off because an exam isn't hard enough, you know there's something wrong.

Here are some direct quotes from some of my students:

"You needed to have barely any actual knowledge of biology in order to take this exam.  A few of the terms from Regents Biology would have been enough to get by on."

"I had worked hard and prepared for this exam.  I'd read the new curriculum and course outline, and I worked hard in class.  I felt like I had this material down.  This test was an insult to all of the hard work I put in."

"The reading passages and experimental design descriptions were too long to justify the extremely simple questions we were asked about them."

"The rat pee question wasn't even at the Regents level, it was below Regents level.  We already knew alcohol is a diuretic -- we discussed it in class when we were learning about the kidney.  If I had proposed to my Regents Biology teacher to do this as a final project, she would have said, 'You can do better than that.'"

"My brother is in college, and is taking biology.  I've looked at his textbook and lab manual.  And if I'd taken a course that prepared me to be successful on this exam, that course wouldn't have prepared me to be successful in the college biology course he's taking."

"I felt like even though they were shooting for a more conceptual approach, I wasn't being asked to apply concepts at a very high level.  The carbon cycle question, in particular, was not at a college level.  We knew that amount of detail in seventh grade."

Allow me to interject at this point that this group of 29 young people ranks amongst the top three AP biology classes I've ever taught in terms of drive, curiosity, and depth of understanding.  We're not talking about a bunch of slackers, here.  They had good mastery of the material, and are ready to make the jump to college science classes.  The fact that they ended the school year this way is a crashing letdown, and will remain that regardless of what their scores turn out to be.  (And interesting, too, that one of my best and brightest, who aced damn near every quiz and test I gave her this year, when I asked her what score she thought she got, replied, "I could have gotten a one.  I could have gotten a five.  I could have gotten a three.  I really, honestly have no way to tell how successful I was on this exam.")

So, there you have it.  The College Board has fulfilled its educational goal of taking a test that was, on the whole, rigorous but fair, and turning it into a hash.  Again, I shouldn't be surprised; that's been the result of virtually every educational shift I've seen in the last twenty years.  Oh, and one other thing I'm expecting: not only do educational oversight agencies take their Great Leaps Forward by mucking things up royally, they never admit afterwards that they screwed up.  So expect to see press releases soon from the College Board about how wonderful their New and Improved exam was, and how teachers and students everywhere are singing its praises to the skies.  Look, too, for them to begin to "improve" the exams in all of the other AP courses.

I hope I'm retired by then.

Breaking the lockstep of standardized tests

I've been an educator for 26 years.  During that time, I've handed out, proctored, and graded more quizzes and exams than I would even try to estimate.  Through it all, when asked why I give conventional tests (at times when I have a choice), my answer has been that they act as formative assessments -- allowing students and teachers to see how far their understanding of the subject at hand has progressed, and (importantly) to give them feedback on where the "holes" in their knowledge lie.

Standardized tests are defended with some of the same arguments, with the added one that (given that everyone is taking the same exam at the same time) it also allows administrators to judge how the school as a whole is performing.  In other words, it gives a basis for evaluating the entire system.

The Educational Testing Service, which is responsible for a large percentage of the standardized tests given in the United States, defends standardized testing in schools as having the following purposes:

• Placement: Determine which courses or level of course a student should take.
• Curriculum-based End of Course Testing: Determine whether students have mastered the objectives of the course taken.
• Exit testing: Find out whether students have learned the amount necessary to graduate from a level of education.
• Policy tools: Provide data to policymakers that helps them make decisions regarding funding, class size, curriculum adjustments, teacher development and more.
• Course credit: Indicate whether a students should receive credit for a course he or she didn't take through demonstration of course content knowledge.
• Accountability: Hold various levels of the education system responsible for test results that indicate if students learn what they should have learned.

This is predicated, however, on a pair of assumptions that runs through all of these justifications.  These assumptions are rarely questioned, but if either one of them is false, it would be sufficient to call into serious question our increasing reliance on test scores.  These assumptions are:

 (1)  Test scores are an accurate measure of student understanding;

and (2) How well students do on tests is solely due to how well they're taught.

I have come to believe that both of these statements are wrong.

The flaw in Assumption #1 comes from the definition of the word "understanding."  What does it mean to "understand" something?  Does it mean that you can recall, and use correctly, the relevant vocabulary?  Does it mean that you can apply your knowledge in some practical way?  Does it mean that you can draw connections between that knowledge and your knowledge of other fields?  I would argue that traditional tests -- even well-designed ones -- measure vocabulary-related knowledge fairly well, but almost never measure practical application or creative divergent thinking.  To measure those would take a great deal of time -- far more time than teachers or students are ever given for testing purposes.

It brings up the question, too, of "how does understanding happen, and how do tests contribute to that understanding?"  In my experience, understanding is unpredictable, sudden, and frequently comes out of collaborative problem solving; and that tests, as they're usually administered, almost never improve understanding in any way.  More often than not, test scores are looked upon as an end in themselves, not as a benchmark for growth or an opportunity to remediate.

A recent experiment by Peter Nonacs, a professor of behavioral ecology at UCLA, turned the whole exam model on its head by creating a novel testing environment.  Students were told a week ahead of time that they'd be allowed to "cheat" on a major exam.  They could do whatever they wanted during the exam, short of anything illegal.  They could bring in books, bring in notes, bring in a knowledgeable friend.  They could talk to each other, talk to students who'd taken the class before, call someone on their cellphone, leave the room to go consult a reference they'd forgotten.  They could ask the professor for hints (whether he provided them would be his decision.)  Work alone, work in groups, have the whole class take part and turn in identical answers.  In short: it was a free-for-all.

The result?  Most of the students chose to collaborate.  They divided up the class into teams, and gave each team a piece of the test -- but the individual groups had to present their answers to everyone to make sure they were good enough.  They argued points, proposing solutions that were ranked for plausibility and eliminating weak arguments.

In the end, they turned in a strong, well-reasoned examination, and I would argue that they learned far more from that experience than they would have learned by studying, and testing, alone.  Nonacs writes, "In the end, the students learned what social insects like ants and termites have known for hundreds of millions of years. To win at some games, cooperation is better than competition. Unity that arises through a diversity of opinion is stronger than any solitary competitor."


Then, there is Assumption #2; that somehow, test scores are well-correlated with what the classroom teacher is doing, and that teachers (and, by extension, the curriculum) are accurately assessed by how well students do on examinations.  If this were true, shouldn't there be far greater uniformity on assessment scores given by the same teacher using the same curriculum?  Of course, the flaw in this idea is glaringly obvious to everyone who has spent any time teaching; students are not little empty vessels that we can fill with knowledge, and measure by opening up their brains at the end of the school year and seeing how much is still there.  They come with differences in their mental hardwiring, differences in attitude, differences in their emotional and physical maturity.  They have different home lives, different amounts of parental support, differences in the demands they deal with outside of school.  Some use drugs and alcohol.  Some are mentally ill or developmentally disabled.

And we pretend, for some reason, that a sufficiently trained and motivated teacher, using an excellent curriculum, can get all of these children to the same place at the same time.

Get real.

The problem is, oversight agencies haven't admitted that reality yet, so that is exactly what they do pretend.  The pressures to "succeed" in that impossible task (whatever form "success" would actually take) are incredible, and the penalties for failing are harsh.  More and more there is a push to tie teacher salaries and job retention to test scores, and to link educational funding for school districts to the pooled results on standardized examinations.

The result has been panic on the part of a lot of school administrators, and some of the solutions they have come up with have been byzantine, not to mention disheartening.  Just this week, the Broward County (Florida) School District proposed that the minimum grade for students be raised from 0 to 50.  Students would receive the same grade -- a 50 -- for doing half of the required work as they would for sleeping through class, every single day, for 180 days straight.

The argument by the school board is that it creates a safety net.  "It's eliminates situations a child cannot possibly recover from, thus allowing them an opportunity," said Cynthia Park, the district's director of college and career readiness.  "Once they become hopeless, it's like why should I try?"

I would like to ask Ms. Park, however, if the real message here isn't that grades simply don't mean what educators have claimed that they mean, and that we need to reconsider our reliance on them.

But how can we change things?  To alter this model, it would take a complete overhaul of how we approach education; it would be costly.  It would require administrators to let go of their demand that everything in student and teacher performance be turned into numbers.  It would require us to redefine what we mean by "learning," to include the kind of creative, collaborative problem solving that Professor Nonacs saw in his class.

But it might, perhaps, change the face of education, and pull us out of the downward spiral in which schools have been locked for decades, and create an environment where all children get the opportunity to learn the knowledge they need, and progress as fast as they are able.  It might free us from the lockstep march toward uniformity that insists on throwing away talent that it cannot, or will not, foster.

Is this utopian?  Why?  If our commitment is, as it should be, to create smart, versatile, creative individuals, we had better rethink what we're doing -- because the system, as it is, is not working.

Vietnamese mystery rocks, and the fear of admitting ignorance

Yesterday I ran across a story that is mostly remarkable because of the last paragraph.

Entitled "Odd Rock Covered in Unidentified Hieroglyphics Rumored to Cast Spells," the article was written by Dana Newkirk, and appeared in an online compendium of "Forteana" called Who Forted?  (The "Fort" references, for those of you unfamiliar with this peculiar little slice of Americana, come from Charles Fort, an iconic figure in the investigation of the paranormal and "anomalous phenomena" in the early 20th century.)

Anyhow, the story starts off in an ordinary fashion, for this sort of thing.  We hear about a large rock in Vietnam, covered with carvings, that was donated to the Thuong Temple in Phu Tho in 2009.  Of course, as you might expect, it isn't the anthropological or linguistic significance of the artifact that is the point of interest here; there's got to be something weird going on with said rock, and in short order we find out that the residents of Phu Tho think the rock has "the ability to cast a strange enchantment," and are staying away from the temple because they're afraid of it.

As far as what the carvings mean -- or even how old they are -- that's unknown.  "Unfortunately not much else is known about the strange rock or the ancient symbols covering its entire surface," Newkirk writes.  "Currently the province is compiling a scientific committee with the intention of studying the strange rock with the hopes of finding some answers regarding where it came from and what the strange markings might mean."

Okay.  So far, we've got a mystery rock and some superstitious people in a remote country.  Neither one is a rare commodity, and would certainly not warrant a mention by themselves.  But here's how Newkirk wraps up her article:

So, what the heck is it? A star map? Some kind of tool? Or is it just some really bored guy [sic] a few hundred years ago? We want to know what you think! Share your thoughts with us on our Facebook page, tweet us @WhoForted, or leave a comment below!

I'm pretty sure she meant "was it really just made by some bored guy a few hundred years ago," not that the rock itself was a fossilized person, but even that's not the point.  When I read the last paragraph, my immediate response was, "Why on earth is what I think even remotely relevant?"  I know nothing whatsoever about the "odd rock" except what Newkirk just told me; I can't find any mention of it anywhere except in Who Forted?  I know zilch about Southeast Asian archaeology, history, and linguistics.  My opinion on this topic would be completely worthless.

And yet, I'm sure that Newkirk will be inundated with opinions from ignorant individuals like myself.  Because -- and I have the sense that this problem is especially bad here in the United States -- everyone thinks it's their god-given right to have an opinion about everything, and to trumpet that opinion from the rooftops, regardless of how little in the way of facts they might know about the issue at hand.

I find this whole thing intensely irritating, because I run into it almost on a daily basis.  For example, just a couple of weeks ago, I was asked by a friend, "What do you think the federal government should do about the sequester?"  I responded, "I have no idea.  I don't know nearly enough about economics or politics to weigh in."  My friend frowned and laughed at the same time and said, "Come on.  You must have some kind of opinion."

No, actually I don't.  And if I did, it wouldn't mean anything.  I'm pretty aware of the topics about which I am ignorant, and I try my hardest not to pretend I'm well-informed about them; and I don't have any particular problem with saying, even to my students, "I don't know the answer to that."  (In my classes, I usually follow it up with, "... but I'll look into it and see if I can find an answer for you.")  But I find that a lot of people are acutely uncomfortable with admitting ignorance, and feel the need to have an opinion on topics for which they should simply withhold judgment until they actually know what they're talking about.

I wonder if perhaps this is one of the negative outcomes of living in a representative democracy.  We have a "one person, one vote" system, in which my vote and the vote of the greatest genius in the country have exactly the same weight and the same effect on the outcome.  (Which, honestly, I am all in favor of.)  But this has the untoward consequence of giving people the impression that because every person's vote is worth the same amount, everyone's opinion is worth the same amount.  Which it clearly is not.  To make it even more obvious: if I were to talk to Stephen Hawking, and I were to say, "Professor Hawking, let me tell you what my views are on quantum physics," he would not be obliged to listen to me, and in fact would be well within his rights to tell me to piss off.  Democracy is a lovely model for governance,  but makes no sense at all when it comes to ideas.

Unfortunately, this whole thing pervades our thought processes all the way to the top, and is why we have people like Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Representative Paul Broun of Georgia blathering on about how evolution is "unproven" and "controversial," even though from their comments it's pretty evident that they haven't the vaguest idea what they're talking about.  And I find this especially appalling given that both men have reasonably decent science backgrounds -- Jindal has a B.S. in biology from Brown University, and Broun a medical degree from the Medical College of Georgia, so they should both know better.  Despite that, in the stories I linked (which you should definitely check out), Jindal says that creationism should be taught in public schools because we want kids exposed to "the best facts" and "the best science."  Broun was even more blunt, calling evolution "lies straight from the pit of hell."

Can anyone tell me why either of these men's opinions is in the least relevant, when they evidently have no knowledge about the topic upon which they are expounding?

So no, I won't tell you my opinion about the sequester, or about the Vietnamese mystery rock.  It wouldn't mean anything if I did.  And I might be prone to a lot of mistakes, but bloviating on a subject about which I am ignorant is one I try my best to avoid.

This always reminds me of the wonderful quote by Isaac Asimov, which seems a fitting way to end this post:

A call to civil disobedience

This time of year is always a difficult one in public schools -- and it has little to do with it being March, a month with no three-day weekends.

It's budget time.  State and federal funding levels have been set, local school boards are deciding on this year's tax levy -- and that means the announcement will soon come that identifies whose head is on the chopping block.  This is the season when younger teachers and teachers in the "non-core" disciplines such as art, music, and technology begin to polish up their resumés.  This, despite the fact that the number of years a teacher has taught has little correlation with his or her skill.  This, despite the fact that the areas dismissively referred to as "non-core" subjects are ones that expand the mind, foster creativity, push students to draw connections between disparate fields, and are downright enjoyable.

People -- teachers, students, and community members -- give lip service to how unfair it all is.  Every damn year.  "We should be committed to keeping excellence in our schools."  "We need to support public education."  "Build more schools, or build more jails."  And yet, each year at this time, we fight the same battles, having to cross swords with school boards who are strapped for money, arguing that our programs shouldn't be cut.  Inevitably we teachers end up in the uncomfortable position of trying to protect our own asses.  I give an impassioned plea to the board to save my job -- all the while knowing that if my position isn't cut, that of the teacher in the next classroom may well be.  At the same time, the state and federal government lays on more unfunded mandates, more high-stakes testing, as if you can legislate inspiring teaching, as if you can quantify the ability to foster creative connections with children.

Most teachers are team players.  Most of us went into the field because it seemed a good fit -- meaning we respect order and authority, believe that employees should do as told, think that whoever is in front of the room must know what (s)he is talking about.  So we grumble about all of the new laws -- laws that, in my state, will give teachers a numerical grade at the end of each year, based in part on how students perform on high-stakes end-of-the-year tests.  We complain about every year doing more with less.  We mourn for talented teachers who have been laid off, curricular areas that are simply not going to be taught any more because the school district couldn't afford to teach art, or choral music, or foreign language, or AP classes, or computer-aided design.

But we do little more than talk.  A big news story in New York state came just this week from the town of New Paltz, where the school board voted unanimously to protest on the state and federal level the increased reliance on high-stakes standardized testing, and the unfunded mandates, and the skewed and statistically absurd teacher rating system ("APPR"), and the destructive funding formula that has every year in the past five years caused significant reductions in staff.  (Read the whole resolution here.)  Although a step in the right direction, this amounts to nothing more than a symbolic gesture; Governor Cuomo and the state and federal Departments of Education have no particular motive for listening.  It still, honestly, is little more than talk, albeit on a different level than the demoralized complaining I hear on a daily basis.

Maybe it's time for something bigger.

Maybe it's time that schools band together and rebel.  No teacher, staff member, or school administrator I've ever talked to thinks that the way things are currently being managed is beneficial to the people who count the most in this endeavor -- the students.  All of us seem to feel that our hands are tied, because the state and federal governments oversee funding -- and if we don't follow the mandates, which (I must add) are almost all generated, crafted, and passed by individuals who have never taught a day in their lives, the purse strings get cut.  Both "No Child Left Behind" and "Race To The Top" carry significant financial penalties for districts who fail to meet the standards.  Because that makes sense, right?  Take districts that are failing, and withdraw more funds from them.  That'll help.

But maybe the time has come for some civil disobedience.  Maybe it'll take a group of school districts who have school boards with some backbone, to take what the New Paltz School Board did, and go a step further.  Say "no" to high stakes testing.  Send back the standardized tests that are now used to evaluate students, staff, administrators, and entire districts, and which have been shown time after time to be an unreliable measure either of student performance or of teacher performance.  Include a note saying, "Sorry, we're choosing not to participate."  Issue an ultimatum to the agencies that hold the power of the purse; revise funding formulas, so that schools can continue to provide quality education to our children -- or we will simply close and lock the doors.

It might be time to play a game of "Who blinks first?" with education, because at the moment, all of the power rests with a group of people who I am becoming increasingly convinced haven't the vaguest notion of what they are doing.  State and federal departments of education are revealing themselves to be a costly failed experiment.  It's time that committed individuals on the local level flex their muscles, and take some risks, to save public education. 

The creationists target Indiana

Well, here we go again.

Dr. Eugenie C. Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, has once again put rationalist Americans on high alert that a state legislator is planning to give a go to at undermining public schools' teaching of biology.

Dennis Kruse (R-Indiana) has announced plans to introduce a bill into legislation drafted by none other than our friends in the Discovery Institute, who have listed amongst their stated goals:

Scientific research and experimentation have produced staggering advances in our knowledge about the natural world, but they have also led to increasing abuse of science as the so-called “new atheists” have enlisted science to promote a materialistic worldview, to deny human freedom and dignity and to smother free inquiry. Our Center for Science and Culture works to defend free inquiry. It also seeks to counter the materialistic interpretation of science by demonstrating that life and the universe are the products of intelligent design and by challenging the materialistic conception of a self-existent, self-organizing universe and the Darwinian view that life developed through a blind and purposeless process.

Lest my more optimistic (and scientific) readers think this won't have a chance, such efforts have already been successful in Louisiana (2008) and Tennessee (2012).  Inevitably it takes the form of some sort of "teach the controversy" argument -- as if instructing students in the findings of valid, peer-reviewed, evidence-supported science represents some kind of satanic indoctrination.  Interesting, too, that no one ever suggests "teaching the controversy" in, for example, chemistry, inducing chemistry teachers to spend a few weeks discussing alchemy -- despite the fact that the findings of evolutionary biologists are no more controversial in scientific circles than those of the chemists.  Oh, and isn't it odd that it seems to be only people who are poorly educated in biological science who think there's a controversy?  (Wait, that's probably just because we biologists were "indoctrinated" ourselves.  Never mind.)

Kruse, for his part, is serious about this.  He pledged when elected to remove evolution from state science standards, and publicly stated, "I'd guess that 80% of Indiana would be oriented with the bible and creation."  No equivocation there, is there?  No mealy-mouthed "teach the controversy" nonsense.  Nope,  just good, old-fashioned young-earth literalism, designed to further hack away at the state of science education in the United States.  It's no wonder there are so many international students in US college science programs, given our determination as a nation to destroy the underpinnings of science teaching in American high schools.

It's to be hoped that the legislators will handle this sensibly (well, in my opinion, "sensibly" would include laughing directly in Kruse's face, but I'm not optimistic enough to hope for that).  Kruse has attempted this sort of thing before, and failed, the last time because the legislature refused to vote and the bill died when they adjourned -- a remarkably spineless way to handle things, and one which doesn't bode well for the future.

The whole thing makes me despair a little.  Of course, that's what Kruse et al. want; to wear down the opposition, to make them give up out of sheer exhaustion.  I don't think they reckon with the likes of Dr. Scott, however, who doesn't strike me as the capitulating sort.  I think her attitude can much better be summed up in the immortal words of Captain Mathazar from Galaxy Quest:  "Never give up, never surrender."

Public schools, boring classes, and science as a verb

A couple of days ago, the Washington Post ran an op-ed piece by David Bernstein entitled, "Why Are You Forcing My Son to Take Chemistry?"  In it, he points an accusing finger at the Maryland public school system for mandating that students take technical classes that they will, in all likelihood, never use again.  "It doesn’t take a chemist to know that my son is not going to be a chemist," Bernstein writes, in response to the objection that all students should be exposed to a variety of subjects, so they can make informed decisions on which career to pursue.  "He’s 15, not 7.  It’s really that obvious.  You took chemistry... What do you remember from that year?  Nada, I bet.  Next time a school official preens about the importance of chemistry, I’m going to ask him or her how many elements there are in the periodic table."

He goes on to rail against the system for making his son sit through a class where "It's all about memorization anyway."  "He will forget everything he 'learned' a week after the class is over," Bernstein writes.  "I can’t remember a thing, and I was a pretty good chemistry student."

He ends by pointing out (correctly) that choices like this one have opportunity costs -- by taking chemistry, the cost is that his son was deprived of the opportunity to take other classes that he would have enjoyed, and profited from, more.  More flexibility in what students study, Bernstein contends, would benefit everyone.

On one level, Bernstein is correct.  I have long been a supporter of more choice in paths for students, especially once they reach high school.  Forcing every student to sit through every general-ed class the school offers, just because "it's a graduation requirement," is wrong-headed.  Our own school system took a step away from that mentality a few years ago, and instituted a highly successful electives program -- there now are, in each subject, multiple tracks students can take to arrive at graduation, and the choices are largely driven by what topics students find intriguing.  (We do still have a great many basic survey courses that are graduation requirements, however.)

I think, though, that Bernstein misses one major point -- a question that is uncomfortable, perhaps, but it should be at the heart of any discussion of why public schools don't, by and large, turn children into competent life-long learners.  That larger question is (apropos of Bernstein's own experience) not why his son is being required to take a tedious class like chemistry, but why his son's chemistry teacher is teaching so as to make chemistry appear tedious.

After all, that's why some people go into chemistry, isn't it?  They find it fascinating.  And think about it... good heavens, chemistry is about stuff reacting.  If anything should be inherently interesting, it should be chemistry.  Why does dynamite explode?  How do chemical hand-warmers work?  Why does Drano clear clogged plumbing?  Why don't the oil and water in Italian salad dressing stay mixed?  Why does salt dissolve in water, but plastic doesn't?  All of these are questions you can only answer if you know some chemistry.

Yes, I know, you have to do some applied math to understand fully what's happening in chemical systems, and the math is what gets a lot of kids stuck.  But the math should be secondary to an understanding of the processes.  Because that's what science is -- a process, a way of knowing.  To quote the eminent astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson:  "Science is a verb."  The fact that Bernstein misses this point illustrates that it isn't just his son's generation that got shortchanged this way.  Note that to illustrate how irrelevant chemistry is to most people's lives, the question he wants to ask a school official is, "How many elements are in the periodic table?"  As if a factlet like that somehow is what scientists are concerned with, as if a collection of such trivia is what science is.

And of course, the problem isn't confined to chemistry.  My own field, biology, is often taught as if it were nothing but a long list of vocabulary words, as if somehow being able to name the parts of the cell or correctly spell "photophosphorylation" means that you understand how cells work, or how plants capture and store light energy.  Once again, there is no way around the fact that you have to know some terminology; we have to be speaking the same language so that we have some common ground upon which to discuss how living systems work.  But too many science teachers teach science as if it were some kind of static body of knowledge, as if the best scientists are the ones who remember the most abstruse words.

No field is immune to this characterization of learning as dry-as-dust memorization.  I had history teachers who taught us that history was just a list of dates, names, and treaties, not what it really is -- a complex interplay of personalities and motives, driven by circumstance, context, culture, and ambition.  It took me five years after graduation from college before I realized that history was interesting.  One of my English teachers in high school once told me, in a superior fashion, "It's low-minded to think that all literature is meant to be enjoyed."  Oh, really?  I wonder if the author would have agreed.  I doubt seriously that (s)he wrote a novel, all the while thinking, "Wow, I bet it will be really difficult for those idiot 11th graders to find the symbolism in this chapter!"

Now, I've been a high school teacher for 26 years, and I know that just as students often have little choice over what classes they have to take, teachers often have little choice over what, and in some cases how, they teach in those classes.  But we can as educators make our classes interesting, relevant, and exciting.  That much freedom we all have.  I have no qualms when I hear a student say about my class, "That was difficult," or "That lesson was a challenge to understand."  I do have serious qualms when I hear a student say, "Biology is boring."  If students, on a regular basis, find your class boring, make no mistake about it: you are failing as an educator, whatever their scores are on the standardized tests that educational policy writers are so enamored of.  Because the bottom line is, there is no subject that is inherently boring.  Taught properly, the universe, and its components and systems and interactions and history, are pretty damn fascinating, and our primary job as educators is to shine some light on a bit of it, and say, "Hey, look!  Look at this!  Isn't this cool?" 

The critics of critical thinking

I fear for the future of education.

I am about tennish-or-so years from retirement, depending on whether New York State decides in the interim to offer any retirement incentives to get us old guys out, and also whether there's any money to pay for my pension by the time I get there.  Be that as it may, I do find myself wondering sometimes how much longer I'll be able to do this job in this increasingly hostile climate.  Teachers are, more and more, being treated with distrust by the people charged with their governance, and are micromanaged to a fare-thee-well.  As of next school year, New York teachers are going to be given a numerical grade at the end of the year -- the school year starts in two months and the state has yet to determine the formula by which this grade will be calculated.

The worst part, though, is the increasingly intense effort by legislators to control what we teach, despite the fact that they're not the ones who have training in pedagogy (or, necessarily, any expertise in educational policy).  And I'm not just talking here about the repeated attempts by fundamentalist elected officials to mandate the teaching of creationism in biology classrooms; I'm talking about something far scarier, and further reaching. 

Yesterday, a friend of mine who lives in Texas sent me a link to the Texas GOP website, which contains a summary of their official platform.  (The platform itself is a pdf, so here's a link to a webpage where you can access it if interested.)  And on page 13, under "Educating Our Children," we find the following:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

This was one of those "I can't be reading that correctly" moments for me; I read it three times, and finally said, with some incredulity, "Nope, that's what it actually says."  They're against critical thinking?  They're against values clarification?  Education should never challenge a student's fixed beliefs?

I'm sorry, Texas GOP.  That's not just wrong, it's dangerously wrong.  Might I remind you that the the most successful historical example of what you're proposing was the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany?

Even the word education, at its origin, doesn't mean "shut up and memorize this;" the word comes from the Latin verb educare, which means "to draw out."  The idea is to give students ownership and pride in their own learning, to encourage them to draw out from their own minds creative solutions to problems and novel syntheses of the facts they've learned.  In order to accomplish this, critical thinking is... well, critical.  Great innovation does not come from blindly accepting the fixed beliefs and authority of your parents' generation -- it comes from questioning your own assumptions, and putting what you know together in a new, unexpected way.

And for me personally, I'm not going to stop challenging.  In fact, I teach a semester-long elective class called Critical Thinking that is one of the most popular electives in the school, and on the first day of class, I walk in and say, "Hi, class.  My name is Mr. Bonnet.  Why should you believe anything I say?"

After a moment's stunned silence, someone usually says, "Because you're a teacher."  (Every once in a while some wag will shout, "We don't!"  To which I respond, "Good!  You're on the right track.")  To those who say, "Because you're a teacher," I say, "Why does that matter?  Could a teacher be wrong?  Could a teacher lie?"

Of course, they acquiesce (some of them with a bit of discomfort).  So then I repeat my question; why would you believe what I'm saying?

This starts us off on an exploration of how you tell truth from lies; how you detect spin, marketing, bias, and half-truth; how to recognize logical fallacies; how to think critically in the realm of ethics and morals; and we end by taking apart the educational system, to give a thoughtful look at its successes and failures.  And (importantly!) I never once interject my own beliefs; I needle everyone equally.  When a student presses me to tell the class what I believe on a particular subject, my stock response is, "What I believe is irrelevant.  My job is to challenge you to examine your own beliefs, not to superimpose mine."

And this sort of thing is, apparently, what the Texas GOP would like to see eliminated from schools.  We mustn't have kids doubting the wisdom of the Powers-That-Be.  We must keep education in the realm of the vocabulary list and worksheet packet.  We mustn't challenge the status quo.  (And the darker, more suspicious side of my brain adds, "And we mustn't have the younger generation recognizing it when they're being lied to or misled.")

Well, I'm sorry.  You're wrong.  What you're suggesting is the very antithesis of education.  And the day I'm told that I can't do this any more -- that my teaching can't provoke, can't knock kids' preconceived notions off balance, can't ask the all-important question "Why do you think that?" -- that will be my last day in the classroom, because there won't be any place left in education for teachers like me.