How Language Affects Thought

I have long had a layman’s interest in linguistics, which seems inherently fascinating. Anyone who has ever beheld a child learning her native language through observation and trial-and-error will appreciate the complexity and magnificence of this apparently effortless achievement. Grammar is so illogical and yet inflexible that specialists have great difficulty trying to impose a set of rules describing it. Yet a toddler quickly learns — usually through simple modeling and no direct instruction — to replace logical expressions such as “I falled down” or “I want meats for dinner” with their standard versions. Ah, if only we could soak up new languages in adulthood half as well as we all did as babies!

Long ago, I watched a NOVA program in which a speaker of Basque repeated the same pair of words, which had separate meanings and sounds to her, and could not, for the life of me, hear the difference. The point of the program was how we are born being able to hear and to say all the sounds of every language but, in true use-it-or-lose-it fashion, unused neurons are gradually pruned away until we can only hear the sounds of our own language(s). So, adult Japanese learning English will say “Ros Angeres” not because they cannot say the “L” sound, but because they cannot hear the difference. (Presumably, a speech therapist can teach us to form sounds properly, just as profoundly deaf people can learn to speak understandably.) Similarly, a non-native English speaker might be unable to distinguish between the spoken phrases “that’s tough” and “that stuff,” although a native speaker will be able to without the help of any context.

Back in the 1980s, I enjoyed the theory behind Robert Logan’s book The Alphabet Effect. Building on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, he asserted that the phonetic alphabets of Western cultures, as opposed to the ideographic writing of the Chinese, both enabled and encouraged the development of deductive reasoning, abstract thought, and empirical science. Think of the implications of needing only a few dozen characters to write down anything, rather than needing new symbols for every single idea. Logan believes that, because Chinese characters are analogs of the words they represent, the Chinese are conditioned to reason by analogy. Westerners, using “meaningless” symbols (letters) to express ideas, are more likely and able to express them without space or time contexts — that is, as universal truths. This notion of “objectivity” is the beginning of the scientific method. The alphabet even gave us a handy way to begin to classify data (by alphabetizing), and classification systems are absolutely necessary in order to manipulate large amounts of data effectively. The concrete and practical nature of Chinese writing and thought made them terrific inventors. The abstract and theoretical nature of Western writing and thought made for better transfer and wider application of inventions.

Who knows whether any of this is true, but it is certainly thought-provoking. It indicates how much of what we find “natural” or “intuitive” is actually based in culture.

A recent New York Times article, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” by Guy Deutscher, expands upon the idea that the particular features of our native language may not constrain what we can think about, but they do change our habits of thought by obliging us to think, often, about something. An obvious example is that English requires us to specify, using tenses, when an event occurred — thus making us habitually take note of time, which has obvious implications for scientific research. Many languages (Spanish, French, German, Russian), unlike English, assign gender to everything — and “various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them.”

But the concept that was new to me, and so truly intriguing, is that languages differ strikingly in how they describe our orientation in space. I was aware that, in general in our culture, women tend to give directions in terms of landmarks and men in terms of cardinal or geographic directions (north, south, east, west). Once Deutscher mentioned it, it was also obvious that we tend to use geographic directions in wide-open spaces but egocentric coordinates (right, left, in front, behind) in small-scale spaces. But it had never occurred to me that languages might exist (among aborigines in Australia, Bali, Namibia, Polynesia, and Mexico) that have no words for or concepts of egocentric orientation. People who can only describe location in compass directions must therefore pay close attention, at all times, to subtle cues to geographic orientation, as well as constantly noting in memory any changes in their own position. And they do! Whether in a strange landscape, in poor visibility, inside a cave, or even referring to something on a television screen, they can instantly and accurately ascribe geographic orientation to what they see. They cannot explain how they know, they just do, even though this skill seems superhuman. Their speech is full of references to position; they could not possibly tell a story without constant notations of the positions of people and things and actions.

How do you imagine this affects other habits of mind? Do you suppose it makes them less egocentric? I bet they’d make terrific explorers on Mars, where the lack of magnetic poles makes compasses useless!

Another really remarkable linguistic difference is illustrated by the Matses language of Peru, whose speakers must always specify in great detail how they came to know any facts they report. Did they experience something directly, hear it from someone else, infer it from evidence, guess it based on past experience or general knowledge? They would never say the truth of a statement “depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is.” Any assertion that does not nail down the evidence for it is considered a lie. What fantastic lawyers they’d make! Or medieval theologians.…

More than you ever wanted to know about school funding

Yes, I know, it’s boring, and complicated, and — to many — seemingly irrelevant to their lives. But we are all paying for K–12 schools, so we are all stakeholders. Here are a few things you may not know about how this works in Michigan. I will absolutely have to generalize and over-simplify, as the system is extremely complex. One of the most complete explications of it was published by the Mackinac Center in 2007, and it is 195 pages long. You can get or peruse A Michigan School Money Primer (Olson & LaFaive) at their website.

First, let’s define some terms. I will only be talking about current operating expenditures (COE) — what it takes to run school districts on a day-to-day basis. Most districts will also have some level of bond funding, the equivalent of long-term mortgages that pays to build schools and cannot be used for operating expenses such as textbooks or salaries. Some also have small levies called (I have no idea why) “sinking funds.” This levy can be used for very limited “building and site” purposes, such as renovation, roof replacement, or land purchase. It cannot be used for the purchase of computers or school buses, or for operational purposes like salaries and benefits.

How Michigan is different

We were one of the first states to move away from reliance on local property taxes as a funding source, in order to make the system fairer. It used to be that a district with a power plant, shopping mall, corporate headquarters, or airport, for example, could raise tons of money with a low tax rate, because those large revenue generators paid so much. Sparsely populated rural areas, on the other hand, could not raise enough money no matter how high the tax rate. Now, since the passage of Proposal A in 1994, homeowners pay a much smaller statewide property tax (see note at bottom), and everyone pays a higher sales tax, so that revenue can be collected and disbursed by the state on a more equitable basis.

The theory was that the quality of a child’s education would be less dependent upon where he lives. In practice, progress toward greater equity stalled after a few years, although the lowest-funded districts are certainly better off than before. By my calculations (comparing only K–12 districts or charters with more than 130 — 10 per grade level — students, so as to set aside the small island districts where costs will necessarily be much higher per student), things may even be worse now. The ten highest-spending (COE) districts in 1993–94 spent 234% as much per child as the ten lowest-spending districts. By 2008–09, they spent 238% as much per child. The disparity should be shrinking again after this past year, when the “Section 20j” money that allowed the wealthiest districts to spend more every year was cut from the State School Aid Act. But those figures (Bulletins 1014) are not yet available.

Where does K–12 revenue come from?

The State School Aid Fund has at least ten different sources. About 43% comes from a portion of sales/use taxes; about 16% from a portion of income taxes; about 15% from the statewide six-mill property tax; about 11% from federal funding (more when we get “stimulus” money); about 5% from state lottery proceeds; and smaller amounts from taxes on tobacco, real estate transfers, casinos, liquor, etc. A small but significant portion comes as a “subsidy” from the state’s General Fund, competing directly with every other spending priority.

But the School Aid Fund provides only part of the total revenue for K–12 schools. Since the adoption of Proposal A in 1994, all funding sources are supposed to guarantee a certain level of funding per student, which varies a bit by district. Districts are no longer allowed to ask voters to approve increases in their operating millage. Funding is doled out on a per-pupil basis: if you gain students, you get more money; if you lose students you get less. Local property taxes (typically 18 mills on business and non-homestead property) are complemented by by a state allocation: when local funding rises, state funding declines, and vice versa.

Before Proposal A, some two-thirds of K–12 funding came from local property taxes and about 29% from state resources. By 2001, these proportions had more than reversed: 78% from/through the state and 17% from local property taxes. Remember: the state share includes the statewide school tax on your home. Instead of going directly to your local district, it is now sent to, and slowly funneled back by, the state. School property taxes are, for the most part, paid in the summer. Those (the six-mill State Education Tax) that are funneled through the state, however, do not begin to come back to local districts until October — long after school has started for the year. State Aid, in fact, is paid in 11 installments, from October through August. That means that three payments (more than 27% of the total) are not made until is school is out for the year. Two of them (18%) are made after the legally specified fiscal year for schools is over on June 30.

Cash flow follies

Holding onto this money helps the state with its cash flow, but at the expense of the local districts. Unless they have general fund balances (that is, uncommitted “savings”) of at least 10% of their operating budget, they will have to borrow money to pay their staff and other expenses (such as buying textbooks before school opens) in anticipation of later receiving that money from the state. In 2008–09, Van Buren Public Schools (VBPS), had to borrow $4.5M in a tax anticipation note — and pay interest on that amount. In 2009–10, it had to borrow $5M.

Another serious cash flow problem has arisen for the first time this summer. The State Aid Formula assumes that districts levy the full 18 mills allowed on non-homestead property; if they do not, their per-child funding will be reduced. Similarly, the State Aid Formula assumes that districts are actually paid the taxes that they are owed. When taxpayers do not pay these taxes, they are considered delinquent and can only be paid to the county treasurer.

Typically, county governments “front” school districts the delinquent taxes in the spring, until they are actually collected through late payments or liens or foreclosures. This year, because of the huge volume of unpaid taxes, Wayne County, at least, has been unable to do that. If the taxes are not paid to local districts by the end of August, they cannot legally be booked in the 2009–10 budget. What this means is that, if local districts do not have fund balances large enough to cover the missing delinquent taxes, they will be retroactively in deficit — which is not legally allowed. VBPS does not have a fund balance large enough to cover the more than $1M in delinquent taxes that the state assumes it has been paid. It is likely that many of the county’s dozens of districts will also be thrown retroactively into deficit. Nor can Wayne County be the only one with this problem. By law, this should trigger state supervision: each such district must submit a deficit elimination plan to the Michigan Department of Education.

What a mess.

[Historical note: Van Buren Public Schools levies a total of 2.98 mills for the new high school bond and 1.13 mills for a sinking fund for major repairs and upgrades to other schools. All property owners pay the six-mill State Education Tax and non-homestead properties also pay an 18-mill tax for operating purposes. Local municipal authorities collect these taxes, with the six being sent to the state and the 18 to the local districts. Before Proposal A, for comparison, VBPS residents had voted to pay a total of 47 mills of local school taxes on all property.]

CORRECTION posted 23 Aug 10: I should have noted some of the changes made when the Michigan Business Tax replaced the Single Business Tax in 2007. As part of that rearrangement of business taxes, industrial “personal property” (equipment, machinery, fixtures, etc.) is no longer subject to the six-mill State Education Tax or to the 18-mill local school operating tax; commercial personal property was made exempt from the first 12 of those 18 mills. In effect, state and local taxes for schools were reduced, and the state promised to replace that revenue to guarantee a per-pupil level of overall funding. I told you it was complicated!

See Dick and Jane cheat

Remember when academic research was a difficult task? You actually had to go in person to a repository of knowledge, search the card catalog or journal indices for relevant sources, find and sift through reams of material, and integrate carefully attributed portions of what you found into your paper. I even live where I do partly because of the mechanics of this process: after my firstborn was provisionally diagnosed with a serious condition on which I could find no information, I swore I would never again live more than 15 miles from a good university library. How quaint that seems now.

In the age of the Internet and broadband access, the process is orders-of-magnitude easier today. You can find information on nearly anything in the comfort of your home, at any time of day or night. And you can also pass the work of others off as your own with amazing ease. That is why plagiarism detection services such as turnitin.com are a growth industry.

A relative of mine teaches in a university MBA program and, much more often than he’d like, serves on appeals boards in plagiarism cases. His university takes this issue seriously: such cheaters get F’s for both the paper and the course, are dismissed from the program, lose tuition reimbursement (if applicable) from their employers, and may even lose their jobs. They continue to do it anyway. These are completely adult, gainfully employed students, from whom one would naturally expect better. They are also part of the sector which, in recent years, nearly brought down the entire United States economy (with the rest of the world, no doubt, likely to follow). The clearly immoral, short-sighted, greed-motivated cheating by so many on Wall Street reinforces the necessity for stronger ethics in business, but one could argue that rampant cheating is undermining our entire society.

Children raised in an environment where the theft of music files, via Napster and its successors, is both commonplace and seemingly acceptable, have a hard time seeing anything wrong with what we geezers call “cheating.” After all, everyone seems to do it. Trip Gabriel reported in the New York Times this month that “in surveys of 14,000 undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted to cheating on assignments and exams,” which is why a similar percentage of colleges use anti-plagiarism services, as do an increasing number of high schools. Students find creative new ways to cheat, on papers, exams, and even homework. Some universities have intensified the tech war by using overhead cameras and strict rules about what can be brought into exam rooms, in addition to the software filters for text.

This is much more than a question of ethics. The Times’ Brent Staples quoted MIT professor David Pritchard: “The big sleeping dog here is not the moral issue. The problem is that kids don’t learn if they don’t do the work.” And that lack of learning has real-world consequences. Would you want your neurosurgeon to be a cheater, or someone who actually learned what he needs to know?

We assume a certain level of competence, especially among professionals for whose services we pay good money — doctors, accountants, teachers, financial advisers, attorneys, design engineers, nuclear power plant operators, etc. What if they’re all faking it?

Staples phrases this better than I could: “We can see that [young people] have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When [they] think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet. They become like rap musicians who construct what they describe as new works by ‘sampling.’ … This is not just a matter of personal style or generational expression. It’s a question of whether we can preserve the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally.”

It’s not all about the grade; it’s about the learning. How could our children have missed that? [Irony intended.]

Follow the Money

An Atlanta-area public school teacher and parent recently wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about her frustration with and questions about the ideas of the National Governors Association on school reform.

Besides lamenting the “destruction of our children that is being carried out under the sanctimonious and specious names of accountability and reform,” Cindy Lutenbacher advises us to follow the money, just as Deep Throat advised Woodward and Bernstein in their untangling of the Watergate scandal. In fact, most people are not aware of the enormous influence of money — both to advance an agenda and to profit on its implementation — that is contaminating reform efforts.

Coincidentally (not!), the folks making the big bucks tend to be politically appointed by those who create these mandates. Plenty of money has been raked in by firms that create standardized tests, or score them, or offer test prep for them, or provide mandated tutoring services when schools do not make adequate yearly progress on them. An amazing percentage of such companies came from Texas during the Bush II years.

Other reform efforts, which are not strictly mandated but are sources of considerable funding for schools, have been similarly corrupt in implementation. For example, Edward Kame’enui and Sharon Vaughn “earned” well over a million dollars as directors of technical-assistance centers that advised states on meeting the Reading First program’s strict guidelines for its billion dollars in grants per year during the second Bush administration. They did this by prescribing reading programs that garnered them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year apiece in royalties — a glaring, if lucrative, conflict of interest.

A third interesting source of cash-related influence comes from what Diane Ravitch calls the Billionaire Boys’ Club: the richest folks in America, through their foundations, have been driving the school reform agenda since before the turn of the century. Grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Microsoft money), the Walton Family Foundation (Wal-Mart money), and the Eli and Edith Broad Foundation (homebuilding and insurance money) embody their billionaires’ aim to transform education using the principles that made them successful in business. Their intent is to bring market-driven competition and incentives to bear on education. Choice and privatization are assumed to produce a better “return on investment.”

They’ve succeeded — not in achieving their goals, but in setting the policy agenda from the federal level down to the individual school level. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top both prescribe reforms based on the theories of these and other very rich men (many from the dot-com boom of the 1990s).

The irony is that, while demanding accountability of teachers, schools, districts, and states, they are accountable to no one. No one elected them. No one can tell them they are mistaken. As Ravitch notes, “to date, not a single book has been published that has questioned their education strategies.” You know why? Because no one can afford to alienate the goose that lays the golden eggs.

What about those strategies?

A prime example of what can go wrong with this foundation-driven approach is Bill Gates’s determination to replace comprehensive high schools with the small (under 400-student) high schools that he thinks are more effective. “Rigor, relevance, and relationship” in these more intimate environments would cure all ills. What few folks realized, in the mad scramble for Gates Foundation grants, was that there was no research proving that small schools are better.

I attended a small high school myself (350 students), so I know their limitations. I’m not talking about the two sports offered, the lack of any art or music beyond a single choir, or the foreign language taught by the unqualified (wherein my French I teacher told us to ignore the accent marks that are fundamental to learning French). No, all those could be considered extras. I’m talking about the weakness in core academic offerings. While my school was excellent in many respects, I was woefully under-prepared for college in science and math, because a school of that size simply did not have the resources to offer advanced physics and calculus classes. (I should mention that, even when two or three small schools co-existed within the same rearranged large building, the terms of the Gates grants prevented them from collaborating to synergize their efforts.)

There had been (1997) research bearing out my concern regarding inadequate curriculum in very small high schools and recommending 600–900 students as a more ideal size. Just this month, a report seemed to find success in the small high schools in New York City, but critics have noted that the improved graduation rate and achievement touted may be illusory, since English language–learners and students with disabilities were (illegally) excluded from these schools for the first few years, and since the well documented “grade-inflation” on the Regents Exams means their results are no longer correlated with those on the SAT or the NAEP exams.

After poor results (several prime-example schools closed in failure) and more than a billion dollars in grants, the Gates Foundation abandoned its small schools advocacy in 2008 and moved to promoting charter schools, pay for performance, Common Core national standards and their joined-at-the-hip national tests, and comprehensive data systems to make all this “accountability” possible. Once again, the strategies preceded or contradicted the research on effectiveness.

Similarly, the Broad Foundation has invested heavily where there were no elected school boards to interfere (in New York City and Oakland after mayoral and state takeovers) or where the board was amenable (San Diego, for a while). Eli Broad wants to run schools as he did his businesses: autocratically. The fact that many of his investments did not pay off to his satisfaction has not discouraged him. Like Bill Gates, he just moves to different places and strategies — with all the strategies seemingly dictated by his corporation-formed “gut instincts.”

It is amazing, when you realize these do-gooder entrepreneurs made their money through creative innovation, to realize that they are now enforcing a focus only on basic skills assessed by standardized tests for a generation of our children. Their philosophy permeates the federal and state departments of education, politicians of all stripes, the foundations that fund research and programming, and even the journals (such as Education Week) that should be judging the true effectiveness of their prescribed strategies — all of whom are beholden to their money.

As Cindy asks, “For the sake of our kids, when will we revolt?”

A solution to the culture wars?

One of the essentials that is largely missing in American education is a common, logical, comprehensive, and sequential curriculum. Our long history of local control and community standards in K–12 schooling has much to do with that. But I believe the primary reason every state, if not every community, “does its own thing” is that it is too difficult to reach consensus on exactly what should be taught.

The apotheosis of cultural infighting over textbook content occurs every few years in Texas, when the State Board of Education reviews and prescribes standards for another area of curriculum. In Texas, the board’s word is law regarding exactly what will and will not be taught. In the recent past, they have mandated phonics over “whole language” (when the correct prescription would have been “both”), explicit challenge of the theories of evolution and The Big Bang, and more emphasis on computational skills than theoretical knowledge in math. This year, in the opinion of many, they took up the rewriting of American history.

No wonder there is little agreement on what a common national curriculum should be. Every choice of inclusion or omission seems to elevate or denigrate knowledge that is important to someone. Is there any way around these culture wars?

Cognitive psychologist and University of Virginia professor Daniel Willingham thinks so. In his book Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, he rephrases the question: “What should students be taught? is equivalent not to What knowledge is important? but rather to What knowledge yields the greatest cognitive benefit?”

How does content matter to learning? It depends upon the subject. In the area of reading, there is a phenomenon known as the “fourth-grade slump.” Children from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to do as well as more privileged children in the early years of reading instruction, when the emphasis is on decoding skills. By fourth grade, however, the mechanics of reading have largely been mastered and the focus switches to comprehension. The problem with comprehension is that it is strongly tied to background knowledge; in that, children from richer environments have a definite edge, so a gap in reading test scores opens then and widens every year thereafter.

Background knowledge is important because no writer ever says everything she knows on a topic. We leave out what we assume our audience already knows — otherwise, writing would be both boring and too comprehensive. No one will take the time to plow through overly long expositions of what he already knows. So, if you don’t know what has been left unsaid, you can be in real trouble.

All of us have had experiences where an expert did not share knowledge we needed because it was so obvious to him that it did not occur to him that we would not know it. Decades ago, for example, I was infuriated by math problems in Scholastic Aptitude Tests that assumed I was familiar with certain sports jargon, when it might as well have been Greek to me. In the early 1990s, when my first university email account was accessed through a UNIX mail program, the “cheat sheet” directions were useless to me until I discovered that commands only worked at the beginning of a new line — a fact that had been way too obvious to programmers to be worth mentioning. The same frustration and poor performance dogs the child who knows nothing of the content of a reading selection, compared to her more well-read fellow student. She must work hard to decode new vocabulary and try to tease its meaning from context, and she will have large gaps in understanding where prior knowledge has been assumed.

What does this have to do with curriculum design? When it comes to reading, Willingham argues, we must concede that “much of what writers assume their readers know seems to be touchstones of the culture of dead white males.” Unless and until our culture changes and writers stop making those assumptions, he advocates teaching that material to our students so that all can read the “same breadth of material with the same depth of comprehension” as the more privileged kids. In other words, giving in to traditional cultural biases is better for our children cognitively—at least until the day we stop weaving metaphors and phrases from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Mother Goose into our everyday language. Children need the culture’s common background knowledge in order to become good readers. That notion could reduce our fights over the content of the books we call readers. (And, of course, children without books in their homes must be given plenty of them to read, so that they can catch up in general knowledge.)

But what about everything else? Willingham gives a different answer to “What should students know of science, of history, of mathematics? The question is different because the uses of knowledge in these subject areas are different from the uses of knowledge for general reading. Reading requires relatively shallow knowledge.” Just knowing the definition of words (such as “savannah,” “cheetah,” and “eland”) will facilitate reading about an African ecosystem. But deep understanding of the interdependence of species and fauna and weather calls for knowledge of ideas as well as vocabulary. “Cognitive science leads to the rather obvious conclusion that students must learn the concepts that come up again and again — the unifying ideas of each discipline. Some educational thinkers have suggested that a limited number of ideas should be taught in great depth…. From the cognitive perspective, that makes sense.”

This perspective adds another voice to argument that American K–12 education should retreat from the mention-everything approach that is widely derided as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” What good does it do to “cover” so much material if we remember none of it? I recall nothing about the Moguls of India, for example, except their name. The cognitive psychologist knows that, for something to make it to long-term memory and stay there, repetition is required. That’s why I may have forgotten the quadratic equation in the 40 years since I last used it, but someone who used it for 10 or 20 years never will forget it. Repetition helps us learn and reinforcement over time helps us retain. We won’t have time for either unless we cut something out of our curricula to make room for it.

So, in core subject matter courses, we can at least battle over fewer ideas. This won’t help much with biology, where evolution is the grand unifying idea, but it might be helpful everywhere else.

Merit Pay for Teachers

Should K–12 teachers be paid according to how well their students learn? This is one of those ideas that sounds like a no-brainer. After all, aren’t other professionals routinely evaluated and compensated in some way that relates to their accomplishments? Why shouldn’t teachers, too, be rated on their effectiveness and paid more when they do a better job?

The problem, it seems to me, is how their effectiveness can be fairly evaluated. Looking at student outcomes seems reasonable, but that is not simple. We tend to oversimplify it by judging what children learned on the basis of achievement test scores. Most would agree that absolute score differences (just higher scores) are no measure of teacher effectiveness. Obviously, not all students of the same grade begin the year at the same level or possess the same skills. If we used that measure, everyone would fight to teach only the most gifted and motivated students.

So, should we use a growth or value-added model, to see whether individual children show a year’s progress in a year? I ran across a very entertaining video in which cognitive psychologist and University of Virginia Prof. Daniel Willingham describes — in less than three minutes! — six problems (some conceptual, some statistical) with evaluating teachers by comparing student achievement in the fall and in the spring. Among them are biased data when some children move away during the year, the effect of others on how teachers do (such as the help or hindrance of a building administrator), and the effect of peers — is the classroom cohort rowdy or well-behaved? I’ve spent enough time in classrooms to know that sometimes there is a student who seems to suck all the oxygen out of the room, making life difficult for everyone else. I might add that some years (when going through a messy divorce, or when grieving the loss of a child or a spouse) will find a typically great teacher unable to think or function as well as usual. Should she be fired? Are her students permanently harmed? I think of the lessons in compassion and in dealing with difficult people that I and my children learned from such sub-optimal school years — which reminds me of all we learn that is useful in life but not evaluated on tests.

A related conceptual problem with using test scores is that they focus on short-term gains. Most of us, in higher education and then in adult life, did not find that only discrete bits of information were important. Broader knowledge and skills — and especially the abilities to research, evaluate, learn, and apply things on our own — were much more vital to our success. Yet these skills are not evaluated on most tests.

Portfolios of student work give a superior picture of student abilities, but they would be very expensive and time-consuming to evaluate in a fair way. If we cannot find the time or money for essays in our achievement tests, then, realistically, we’ll never use portfolios.

This hints at the major problem with test results as a measure of student learning: in order to make massive testing programs at all affordable, we have made them much less valid over the years. Our MEAP writing test, for example, used to require legions of low-paid evaluators. Not only was this very expensive, and so time-consuming that Michigan was penalized by the federal government for being late with the scores (under No Child Left Behind rules), but it proved nearly impossible to get consistent grading from so many evaluators. So, the writing test today involves very little actual writing.

You get what you measure, especially if the tests have high stakes, and we are not measuring the complex skills that our children need for life success. Even the gains we do measure can be evanescent, disappearing soon after the tests were scored.

Professor of education at California State University, Monterey Bay, Nicholas Meier (rightly) fears that basing teacher pay on test scores will encourage even more focus on test fodder and test preparation alone, at the expense of more worthwhile endeavors. I recently heard an impassioned speech about education outreach plans for the Yankee Air Museum that involved teaching children forgotten history and engaging them in exciting activities, since schools no longer do. My reaction was a sad acknowledgment that, yes, if it’s not on the MEAP, our teachers don’t have time for it anymore. We trade hundreds of students (and their indispensable funding!) back and forth every year with charters and schools of choice — and those decisions are most likely made on the basis of test scores. The draconian penalties levied by NCLB are base largely on test scores. And now we want to raise the stakes by basing teacher pay and job security on them too?

Dr. Meier says this better than I could: “There is an axiom in the social sciences known as Campbell’s Law that says that the higher the stakes on a particular social indicator (e.g., a single test score), the more the use of that indicator corrupts the original intent, as it encourages people to manipulate the system to look good on that indicator regardless of other effects. We see that happening already—retaining students so they take the easier test; pushing kids to disappear from the system. There is the focus on the kids that show the most promise of moving from one category to the next, while ignoring others. Not to mention the examples of out and out cheating….”

So, no, I have little hope that pay for performance will improve public education.

There are other ways to evaluate teachers, of course, with classroom observation being a time-honored one. This tends to be more of a good idea than a good practice, though, as it is done too rarely for validity. As a young teacher in my family put it: “Who will be doing my evaluation? Will it be an administrator who has classroom experience? If so, will that be experience in my field or something totally unrelated? Are those responsible for my evaluation familiar with the standards the students are expected to achieve? If not I would question, seriously, the reliability of their judgment.”

When you think about it, there is a good reason many teachers are suspicious and fearful about the performance-based evaluation required by the federal Race to the Top education funding program. If they are unconvinced of the fairness or validity of evaluation by their own administrators, think how much less confident they must be about the judgment of state legislators (who have changed laws to comply with RttT) in this matter.

Achievement Gap or “Vacation Gap”?

Probably the single thing that everyone involved with or concerned about public education can agree upon is this: some children — often minority or English language–learning, but almost always “economically disadvantaged” — have not done as well as others. We usually call this the Achievement Gap, and the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind was intended to close such gaps. Race to the Top, the Obama administration’s variation on the theme of using carrots and sticks to fix our schools, is equally concerned with closing the gaps. The idea is to have all our children — rich and poor, white and minority, native English speakers and not, those with disabilities and not, boys and girls, migrants and not — becoming equally well educated.

Of course, we don’t define, let alone validly measure, how well they are educated. But we do use the proxy of achievement test scores, assuming that these will correlate with our true objective of producing adults who can function well in society.

Some children come to schools in some way handicapped — they start the race from further behind and run it without the ongoing advantages of other children. These are the ones who need something different and/or something more than what appears to work for the high-achieving students. The assumption, implicit in the critical view of teachers that has now become commonplace, is that schools simply are not getting the job done for under-achieving students.

In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tears into this and other mythical ideas about who succeeds and who does not. He looks at several keys to success — specific and unusual opportunities, perfect timing (month and year of birth), cultural advantages and disadvantages — to make the case that no one is “self-made.” One of his most interesting bits of evidence directly relates to achievement gaps.

Gladwell reviews in some detail a study done by Johns Hopkins sociologist Karl Alexander of hundreds poor, middle-class, and wealthy children in 20 Baltimore City public schools. This longitudinal Beginning School Study started in 1982 and is ongoing, but the results from just the elementary years seemed to demonstrate something important, as reported in 2007 by Entwhisle, Alexander, and Olson in a journal article titled, “Lasting consequences of the summer learning gap.”

The children studied began first grade in different places, but the achievement gap between high- and low-socioeconomic-status children nearly doubled over the elementary school years. But neither differences in native ability nor in teaching quality explained this phenomenon. Because they were given the California Achievement Test at the beginning and the end of each year, test results could show that poor children actually “out-learn” rich ones during the school year (at least insofar as CAT reading scores can indicate). During the summers, however, the poor children fall behind and the more privileged ones surge ahead. The achievement gap really stems from what is not happening for poor children when they are not in school.

This makes sense if you assume one set of children benefits from a more enriched environment (travel, camps, museums, plenty of reading material), but there is also evidence that the differences can be compensated for. The KIPP charter schools, for example, seem to do very well with disadvantaged children — but those children spend more than twice as much time in school, including much longer days, Saturdays, and summer sessions. Simply addressing the books-at-home gap, however, can have startlingly large effects on children's reading skills. Many studies have found strong correlations among the number of books in the home, the amount of voluntary reading done by children, and their tested reading levels — and this can be fixed. One way, which I noted earlier, is to pay children $2 to read and answer quizzes on books. Another is to give them books to read over the summer (remember, these are kids who cannot or do not get to the public library).

You can read one such study, reported on by James Kim, in which more than 500 children were each mailed 8 books during July and August. “The estimated treatment effects on a standardized test of reading achievement (Iowa Test of Basic Skills) were largest for students who reported owning fewer books at home, less fluent readers, and minority students. These findings suggest that a voluntary summer reading intervention may represent a scaleable and cost-effective policy for improving reading achievement among lower-performing students.”

Makes me want to collect old children's books from friends my age and start giving them away....