MGTutoring.com. A Rational Perspective on Education.

In “A Letter from a Child” (CapMag, October 5, 2009), Thomas Sowell writes:

One of these self-indulgences was exemplified by a letter I received recently from a fifth-grader….

He said, “I have been assigned to ask a famous person a question about how he or she would solve a difficult problem.” The problem was what to do about the economy.

Instead, I replied to his parents: With American students consistently scoring near or at the bottom in international tests, I am repeatedly appalled by teachers who waste their students’ time by assigning them to write to strangers, chosen only because those strangers’ names have appeared in the media.

It is of course much easier…to do cute little stuff like this than to take on the sober responsibility to develop in students both the knowledge and the ability to think that will enable them to form their own views on matters in both public and private life.

…

The damage does not end with wasting students’ time and misdirecting their energies, serious though these things are. Getting students used to looking to so-called “famous” people for answers is the antithesis of education as a preparation for making up one’s own mind as citizens of a democracy, rather than as followers of “leaders.”

Nearly two hundred years ago, the great economist David Ricardo said: “I wish that I may never think the smiles of the great and powerful a sufficient inducement to turn aside from the straight path of honesty and the convictions of my own mind.”

In “Low Graduation Rates and the Total Lack of Student Effort“  (Phi Beta Cons Blog, 09/25 01:52 PM), David French writes:

A week ago I was on a Southwest flight from Dallas sitting next to a very pleasant middle-aged woman who was busily grading papers. As I finished watching one of America’s greatest cinematic masterpieces on my (brand-new) MacBook Pro, I glanced over at some of the work. It looked identical to the work I see from my ten-year-old daughter and her classmates: Mostly simple sentences, a few dreadful spelling mistakes, and virtually no complex analysis. Unlike my daughter’s classmates, however, this teacher’s students skipped entire sections of their tests — failing to answer half the questions.

I was just about to open my mouth and say, “Fifth grade?” when I caught myself.  Instead, I said “What grade?”

“Junior English.”

“High school?

“Yes. In suburban Chicago.”

I almost choked on my peanuts.

I thought of this exchange as I read Richard Vedder’s Minding the Campus essay on low graduation rates. Out of every 100 American students who enter high school, only 20 get an undergraduate degree. This is a remarkable failure rate, especially given two factors that Richard mentions: (1) grade inflation (no one flunks anymore) and (2) soaring amounts of financial aid.

Why so many failures? I think the heart of the problem is — to use Richard’s phrase — the “willingness to work.” Simply put, American college students are lazy on a scale that boggles the mind. It’s a laziness that starts early and develops year by year as “breathe-in, breathe-out” promotions (just stay alive and you’ll get through) allow students to not only progress from kindergarden to twelfth grade, but do so with a solid “B” average. It’s a laziness reinforced by the extraordinarily low academic demands of even elite universities. I studied half as hard in law school as I worked my first year in the “real world.”

The synopsis of the documentary “The Providence Effect” says:

Paul J. Adams III, an African-American man with activist roots in the 1960’s civil rights movement, came from a family of teachers.  After being black listed himself as a teacher in Alabama because of his civil rights activities, he moved to Chicago, received a master’s degree in psychology, and then landed a job as guidance counselor at Providence St. Mel, an all-black parochial school on Chicago’s notorious drug-ridden, gang-ruled West Side.

A year after his arrival, Adams became principal, only to be told the following year that Chicago’s archdiocese was going to close the school.  After orchestrating a fundraising campaign that received national and local media attention, funds poured in and enabled Adams to buy the school from the Sisters of Providence and convert it to a not-for-profit independent school.  To ward off thieves and vandals, he literally moved into the empty nuns’ quarters of the convent inside the school.

He then set about achieving a new goal:  To turn Providence St. Mel into a first rank college preparatory school, and its African-American student body into a corps of driven, disciplined, high achieving students.

That was over 30 years ago.  Since then, 100% of Providence St. Mel graduates have been accepted to college, half of them, during the last seven years, to first tier and Ivy League colleges and universities.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COPYRIGHT 2009. THE PROVIDENCE EFFECT.

Sounds interesting. I’ll have to find out more.

In the blog post “Mourning Constitutional- OK kids score even worse than AZ” (Jay P. Greene’s Blog, Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 10:52 am), Mr. Greene writes:

Regular JPGB readers will recall that the Goldwater Institute gave a version of the United States Citizenship Test to Arizona high school students, only to learn that they were profoundly ignorant regarding American government, history and geography. Only 3.5% of Arizona public school students got six or more questions correct, the passing threshold for immigrants.

The Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs wanted to know how Oklahoma high school students would fare on the exam- so we surveyed them and gave them precisely the same set of questions we asked Arizona students.

Perhaps I ought not to have been so hard on Arizona students. After all, they passed at a rate that was 25% higher than their peers in Oklahoma!

That’s right: the passing rate for Oklahoma high school students was 2.8%. They somehow underperformed Arizona’s already abysmally pathetic performance.

Watch the short videos (1)  “Are America’s Schools Failing Our Kids? ” (6 min, 3 sec); (2)  “Education: Is More Money the Answer? ” (5 min, 55 sec); (3)  “Zoned Out of a Good Education” (4 min, 55 sec);  (4)  “School Choice Proponents Meet Resistance” (7 min 3 sec); (5)  “The Teachers Union Monopoly” (8 min, 57 sec);  (6)  “Competition Leads to Innovation” (5 min, 32 sec).

The videos are from John Stossel‘s September 1, 2006 special entitled “Stupid in America.”

The footage of student behavior is not unusual. In a prior blog post, I had a few videos collected, videos made by students themselves, which videos show the same behavior.

What do you think?

In “What’s the real graduation rate?” (Chicago Sun-Times, February 7, 2005), they said:

Here’s the thing about statistics: If they aren’t rock solid, if they don’t reflect reality, they’re of little use to anyone. And if conflicting statistics are passed off to measure performance levels, they just waste our time even more.

So it goes with two very different readings of the graduation rate in Chicago public schools. According to stats for 2004 issued by the Illinois State Board of Education, 70.7 percent of students graduate in four years. But after examining the slippery methods used to arrive at that number — including not counting transfer students who drop out of their new schools — the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research concluded it was way too high. By their accounting, the graduation rate is only 54 percent — a woeful 39 percent for black male students.

Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan downplayed the discrepancy, saying the studies, taken together, reflect some improvement and a dramatic need for more of it. But it’s an infuriating gap that leaves those who are trying to get a fix on this crucial problem grasping at straws. If, in fact, the 54 percent is accurate, the situation is more dire than anyone thought.

If it isn’t, we need to know what is accurate. Too much is at stake to keep playing this numbers game.

In “Marva Collins’ Way” (Scott Holleran Blog, 5 September 2009), Scott Holleran writes:

Chicago businesswoman Marva Collins brought logic to learning when she rocked the Windy City years ago with her radically rational approach to education, as Susan Crawford, RN, recently reminded readers on her Rational Parenting List (RPL). Like the basketball coach in one of my favorite sports-themed movies, Coach Carter, Ms. Collins confronted the reality of government-run education in the ghetto with reason, optimism, and determination, not determinism.

Teaching that one should examine ideas before accepting them, she started teaching troubled students in her own home, opened her own school, wrote a book, Marva Collins’ Way, and became the subject of a television movie starring Cicely Tyson. Today, she insists that “there is a brilliant child locked inside every student.”

Explaining her program on her Web site, Ms. Collins writes: “The child is taught to refer to what has been learned previously to support an opinion. References come from many different sources, from poetry, newspaper editorials, magazines, great speeches, novels, or any other written material. Everything everywhere provides potentially excellent material for developing reasoning skills…Textbook word-for-word, lock-step methods never make good critical thinkers. There is a difference between word reading and word understanding. And, there is a difference between knowing how to read, and loving to read.”

Learn more about Marva Collins’ philosophy here.

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I have read (years ago) the book Marva Collins’ Way, and recommend it.