eduskeptic

Once again a study has been published about the purported benefits of preschool. The title of many articles that have followed are something like this: Long term study of preschool says better grad rate, less drug use, fewer arrests for children enrolled.” Sounds good. The newest study, published in the online version of Science, isn’t much different from a Rand Corp. study from years ago, and more recently, or other studies done about the effects of preschool.

If you stop at just the title of the article, or don’t read it thoroughly, you might come away thinking that preschool for all is a cure all for all. It isn’t.

Here is a snippet from Time, the online version:

“To cut crime, raise education and income levels, and reduce addiction rates among the poor, no program offers more bang for the buck than preschool, as a new study published in Science demonstrates.” Again, sounds pretty good.

Read a bit further, either in the actual study, or the Time article, and one discovers this:

The children in the study were from the “…lowest-income neighborhoods of Chicago, where nearly 40% of residents live below the poverty line; most of the children were African American.”

This study, like the Rand Corp. (where Chicago was also the area of the study) and other studies, says that children from an impoverished inner city life who went to a “quality” preschool did marginally better than children from the same situation who did not attend a “quality” preschool.

According to the study, the preschool children, 900 of them, had a better graduation from high school rate, a better college acceptance rate, had fewer drug, including alcohol, problems, and fewer arrests, than the control group of 500. It is not a spectacular difference, but any positive difference is good.

The problem isn’t that this study, like the others, will be used in the push for mandatory universal preschool as a panacea for all that ails the national school system and the nation in general. Carefully chosen snippets will be trotted out by various politicians and other hucksters to support their particular school reform package of the day. They can’t help themselves. They smell money.

The real issue isn’t addressed. Preschool, no matter how good, solves nothing. The impoverished communities still exist, the drug infested, squalid houses still exist. Embedded unemployment, constant crime, still exist. A lack of hope for a better life still exists.

With these kinds of issues facing inner-city children and their families every day, the best preschool experience in the known universe won’t overcome the effects of poverty. There doesn’t seem to be anyone willing to put the effort into actually addressing the underlying issues that seem to relegate some children to a clearly difficult life.

Chicago isn’t alone in high poverty inner-city problems. Every state, every city, has it’s own version of the kinds of neighborhoods that the children in the study come from.

It will take a national effort to make any kind of a dent in the multiple ravages that drug addiction, split families, single parent families, and multi-generaltional poverty produce.

The Eduskeptic is forever skeptical of studies like this one, and the others, simply because they are used to further the mistaken notion that their conclusions are applicable to the general population. One simply cannot extrapolate the information and apply it broadly to all children. It simply doesn’t work.

This is not to say that a very good preschool can’t help children get ready for their first few years in the public school system. They can, and do. What they won’t, and can’t do, is solve the basic problems that so many very young children face as a reality every day in poverty stricken areas of our country.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.



A recent conversation with a parent whose child had been in the Eduskeptic’s Kindergarten class highlighted a continuing issue in the education arena. This parent said that she was on the “bad Mom” list (not really, but it is a feeling one gets), because the family had taken trips on school days. Read on:

In my talk with parents at the beginning of each year, I made a few things clear to them: I wouldn’t be successful without their support and help throughout the year; they were welcome any time in our classroom; education and learning were not restricted to the classroom; the time to do things with your family is now, there is no other time to do it; childhood lasts a relatively short time. The list goes on.

For very young children, learning is very intense all the time. There are some opportunities that occur only when children and families are young. It is a time to explore and experience. The classroom offers exploration, experiences, and opportunities for learning. So does everything outside the classroom.

Grandparents need to be visited, places in town and in the forests need to be explored. Lakes, rivers and pools should be splashed in. Trails are there to be hiked. Gardens need to be dug and planted. Snow needs to be skied. Bugs need to be collected, looked at, wondered about. Trips to different places need to be taken. The uniqueness of each season needs to be explored. Unstructured play and exploration need to be there in abundance. The list goes on.

The Eduskeptic told the parents in his classroom that if an opportunity came up to do something with their children (visit Grandparents, camp, ski, explore, have a snuggle day), that they should do it. Education is not only in the classroom. What I asked is that they notify me if they were going to do something special. If it was for 5 days or more, I would gladly arrange for an independent study for them. In California, if the absence is 5 days or more, a completed independent study gives the child credit for the time and the school ADA money for the time. If is less than the proscribed time, no body gets anything, and the schools absolutely do not like any loss of money.

If what they were doing wasn’t going to hit the 5 day mark, but was close, I encouraged them to take the 5 days. If it were just a day or so, I would arrange for them to have the materials that we were going to cover over the day or two that they would be gone. Either way, the children had adequate school material with them. I expected them to keep up. So did their parents.

Another caveat was this: if the child was really behind in class, and I didn’t think that being gone would be to their advantage, I worked harder with the parent to provide lessons for when they were gone, or spent extra time with the child when the family returned.

The Eduskeptic never had any regrets about his approach, nor did the parents. The children did well and almost all of them came back with whatever work I had sent with them, completed.

It is a complicated world. Parents don’t always have the luxury of a job that is Monday through Friday, during the day light hours. Time with the family then must come when the parents are available, regardless of the name of the day.

The parent that the Eduskeptic had the conversation with works 3 days in row, 14 hour shifts, and the days are never the same. Her husband is on a different schedule. Their children are all on the honor roll, which is no surprise to the Eduskeptic. It is obvious that this family spends time with their children, certainly allowing for education to take place no matter where they are.

My response to her was this: continue doing what you are doing. There will come a time when the children will not want to be away from their friends at school. The social structure will take over, and impromptu family excursions will fall by the wayside. It is inevitable. Besides, the children are on the honor rolls at their schools. That alone indicates how this family values education.

As much as the “go to school at all costs” group will howl over the Eduskeptics approach, which lasted for the 24 years he taught Kindergarten, the school system absolutely needs to accommodate families who are wise enough to know that learning is a whole world activity, and not restricted to a classroom.

Not everyone gets opportunities for family explorations. Not every family works a Monday-Friday, daylight hours job. Schools would be wise to support the endeavors of parents who take the time to learn with their children, inside or outside the classroom.

Teachers are hired to teach, which, for the most part, they do. How they teach is as varied as the number of teachers on the planet. No one does the same thing, although similar methods and approaches abound.

What’s more important in the classroom, teachers, teaching methods, technology, class make up? It is not an altogether easy answer, especially now.

Years ago, children communicated with each other by being in the actual presence of others. Sending letters, using the telephone, or passing hand written notes was the highest technology available.

Teachers in classrooms generally lectured about a subject. Depending on the subject, the hands on component consisted of reading, writing, building a model, or, in the case of science, experiments. It’s what was available and it’s what happened, day in and day out, in classrooms across the globe. Mostly, it worked pretty well.

Starting with children who were born about 30 years ago, there was an ever faster change in the way children communicated. The pace of the change simply accelerated over time.

By the time children who were born in 1979 hit high school, and then college, they were keeping in touch with a multitude of modalities. The entire social media experience was on us, and is on us, and continues to change at an extraordinary rate.

The interconnectedness of young people now days is more intense than it has ever been. To some extent, teaching methods have attempted to keep up with all of this. Close, but maybe not close enough.

In a recent study published in Science, the use of a more hands on approach, rather than the traditional large lecture hall experience, appears to have resulted in better test results.

The study by a team at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, in Canada, led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman, used a more interactive, real time feed back method in a physics class of 250 students at the university level. Another 250 students were taught using the lecture method.

The interactive method posted much better test results. The interactive class was taught by two grad students, the lecture class by a well respected Professor.

Oddly enough, Kindergarten uses the interactive, instant feedback method more than anything else. Of course, the biggest difference between Kindergartners and University students is that the University students weigh more and have been around longer. The brain, it seems, learns best by doing.

It seems, according to this rather limited study, that the person teaching may not be quite as important as the method and tools employed by the teacher. This is not to suggest that the teacher hasn’t much to do with the process. Everyone has had teachers who simply inspire those in the classroom, and teachers who are best described as rather flat and uninspiring.

Give the results of this study, perhaps the teaching profession would do well to support the mass inclusion of available technology to match what children, from Kindergarten to college, are already using.

The basic skills still need to be mastered. It’s how they are mastered that may be a tipping point between average and spectacular.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

Bill Gates has, by any standard, been a successful entrepreneur, businessman, and philanthropist. For a college dropout, he’s done rather well.

With the continuing dialog, and at times, bombast, regarding our educational system, there has been a great deal of attention focused on teachers. The main focus seems to be on evaluating teachers. From some quarters, the intent seems to be to get rid of as many senior teachers as possible, from others it is truly a dialog regarding how to put together a competent, helpful, and meaningful evaluation system.

Bill Gates entered the debate with $355 million (USD) through his foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The intent of this is to overhaul the personnel departments of some big school districts, and the way they evaluate teachers.

Social scientists and, according to a newspaper report (Sacramento Bee, 1.04.10), thousands of teachers, are involved in developing a “better system for evaluating classroom instruction”.

There is a $4 billion grant “competition” from the federal government for the same purpose.  Some twenty sates have jumped into the competition pool. It’s a lot of money.

Mr. Gates and his foundation aren’t the first ones in the pool. A widely panned method, put forth by economists, is a statistical exercise that purports to measure how much teachers help their students learn. It is based in changes in standardized test scores, and the changes from one year to the next. It’s called the value added method.

Gates’ effort and research starts with value added. The aim, however, is to develop other, better, methods for measuring teacher effectiveness. A large part of the effort is to also help educators understand the reason one teacher is more successful in the classroom than another. The “help educators” part is a big part of how Gates may be offering something useful.

What is described by researchers and educators involved with the project as “maddeningly complex”, the effort looks at much more than simple, and largely discredited, standardized test scores.

Gates was surprised by the lack of study on what actually makes a good teacher, what he calls the exemplars: “What’s unbelievable is how little the exemplars have been studied.” For those of us who are in or who have retired from the educational system, it’s not a surprise at all. All too often, the high priced trainers who took up staff development time were either rookies with very little teaching history who abandoned the classroom to become corporate trainers to those who simply had never spent any time in a classroom teaching children. They were not credible at all, and we all knew it.

Gates, on the other hand, is using video to help figure out the puzzle. By June, 2011, his researchers should have about 24,000 video taped lessons. Eventually, the researchers will review over 64,000 hours of classroom instruction. They are looking for a correlations between teaching practices, high student achievement, and value-added scores.

Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist, is leading the research. His hope is that more districts will start using classroom videos for training and evaluations. The foundation is working to keep costs down. The start up costs can be significant: $1.5 million for a 140 school district with 7,000 teachers, with ongoing costs in the $800,000 range.

For the most part, districts already spend quite a few dollars evaluating teachers. If the Gates initiative is actually something that provides a quality method for evaluations, then the real costs will have to be quantified.

Did Gates get it right, again? He may have. At the very least, his research efforts are doing the apparently heretofore unthinkable: using actual exemplary teachers and teaching methods to not only evaluate effective teaching methods, but to help teachers reach a better understanding of what it takes to get to the exemplary level. It beats using a system that relies on standardized test scores as a sole method of evaluating effectiveness in the classroom. Standardized test simply aren’t capable of measuring all of the chaotic variables that walk into a classroom with each child, and coming up with anything meaningful. Gates system might be able to do it.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything. It’s less embarrassing that way.

A few weeks ago, the Sacramento Bee newspaper, the only major newspaper in the Sacramento, California, area, ran an article about school superintendent pay.

The article compared the pay of superintendents relative to the number of students in the district. If one were to read the article, and let it be at that, then one would be led to believe that the cost per student in terms of superintendent pay was the highest in a small, two school, rural district. The cost for a superintendent in a large, urban, district was said to be much smaller.

The article was well written. The conclusions were also absolutely wrong. It was a comparison that, on the surface looked legitimate, but it was an apples to alligators comparison. A little bit of research would have revealed that the superintendent of the small, rural district, had no assistants, just the normal office staff: bookkeepers, secretary, financial officer. A look at the large urban district revealed that the superintendent had many assistant superintendents (human resources, curriculum, IT, facilities, maintenance, community resources, and so on). There were 65 different assistants of one kind or another under the superintendent.

When one compares the actual cost of the district offices, the small district is a bargain on a per pupil basis. The large urban district is far more costly per pupil. It just depends on what one counts, and the reason for counting in the first place. Bias comes to mind.

The drop out rate of students across the US is said to be anywhere from 30 to 50 percent, or more. These figures have gained traction among the charter school and choice business people. The figures are not accurate and it doesn’t really take much work to find out that they aren’t. What is true is that school districts across the US don’t have a really good method of figuring out where their students go when they leave.

In an April 19 story, Ed Bott of ZDNet, wrote about the reported number of pc’s that are infected with malware. “Nearly half of personal computers in the U.S. are compromised by malware.” This statement can be found on the internet and in various newspapers and magazines. Bott calls this statement “…an outright fabrication. It is not true. It is not even remotely accurate, based on objective data.” The actual number of infected pc’s, those that have Windows auto update turned on, or who practice normal internet security is around 1%-2%. That’s a far cry from 50%.

Bott simply took the time to track down the information that turned into the 50% number. It turns out that it was a usurped from a statement from Panda ActiveScan regarding people who already thought their pc’s had some sort of malware on them.

The information was quickly misquoted and put out as a fact on the internet, where it picked up a life as a “Fact”.

Pre-school is good for all children, and will keep them out of jail, and in good jobs. It is easy to find this one out there too. The reality is that this was taken from a Rand Corp. study regarding pre-school and the effects it had on a very specific group of children. It was not, and is not, applicable to “all children”.

It doesn’t really take much to look a bit further when reading various claims about just about anything. In just a few minutes, most of the information that is written or quoted, can be verified, or shown to be absolute hog wash. The Internet can be a pretty good research tool when used by inquiring minds.

The constant mantra of the Eduskeptic is always “assume nothing, verify everything.” The education establishment, one would hope, would be leading the charge when it comes to verification of various theories. Assume nothing, verify everything.

Cathie Black has resigned as chancellor (superintendent) of New York City Schools. Actually, she was asked to step down. Black was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg  to the position in November, 2010.

She had no experience as either an educator or education administrator, and no government experience either. Her appointment was an extremely puzzling event. Several long term members of the city’s educational administrative system resigned in protest of her appointment. Due to her complete lack of credentials for the job, it was necessary for the New York State Education Commission to grant her a waiver. David Steiner, who issued the controversial waiver to allow Black to take the job, has resigned his position with the Commission.

Black was, by all accounts, a complete flop. She lasted just about 96 days on the job. Apparently her supposed qualifications for the job were that she was good at business. She was successful in the publishing business. How this was supposed to translate into being able to head up a large and complicated inner city school system remains a mystery.

What should be obvious, but apparently isn’t, is that the educational system isn’t a business. While it seems that quite a few big business types believe that it is, the reality is that it isn’t.

Certainly, education has its business side. All of the buildings, buses, books, and budgets correctly should be looked after by someone with very good business skills and acumen. A very good chief financial officer is an absolute must, from the smallest to the largest districts in the US.

The actual running of these districts, strangely enough, should be done by people who have the experience in the field to understand how complex and wacky the system actually is. I say this lovingly, as someone who spent 36 years as a teacher. I know how strange it actually is.

There continue to be those who attempt, on the basis of a very brief encounter with education, to convince others that they know how to do it better. Keep in mind that within the profession, it takes about 5 years to get out of rookie status. There is a very high teacher drop out rate prior to that fifth year.

Their most common trajectory is this: teach for 2 or 3 years, bail out, start, or sign up with, a “non-profit educational” business, make lots of money, leave that to start another “non-profit” with the goal of re-inventing the entire system, or get a political appointment to a big city district prior to bailing on that to make a fortune with your own “non-profit”.

“Non-profit” is code for paying yourself and your buddies all of the money that would normally be in the profit category, thereby being able to say you run a “non-profit” entity.

It would be obviously absurd to appoint the Eduskeptic to run a hospital, transit system, airline, or any other large enterprise. A complete lack of credentials to do any of those would seem to eliminate the possibility of such a thing happening. Yet, somehow, when it comes to schools, logic disappears from the thinking of the politicians.

Once again it is necessary to say that the educational system has, does, and always will, need improvement. It remains necessary to say that it is not a business system, though it has a business side to it. It is an educational system.

While the so-called policy experts and reformers go about making outrageous claims and money, teachers continue to teach, and good administrators continue to oversee a complicated endeavor.

Michael Bloomberg, and any other mayor who has done what he did, should, rightfully, be embarrassed by his actions and the resulting insult to education.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

It is that bizarre time of year when school districts around the country either have or will be passing out pink slips to teachers. It is a fact of life in the teaching profession. This year seems to be especially difficult for teachers and  school districts due to the uncertain nature of funding for education.

On March 15 several thousand teachers in California alone were notified that their services would not be needed next year. Across the United States, that number is easily in the over 100,000+ range. It may grow as districts finalize their worst case projections as the school year winds down.

It is not just the newer teachers who are potentially facing the unemployment line. Districts have, and always have had, the ability to retain teachers according to the needs of the district, without regard to seniority, regardless of union contracts.

If one were to believe the so called reformers, it is only the newest teachers who are let go. A teacher with 10-15 years of experience is hardly new. Keep in mind that the call to do away with the seniority process is about finances, not education. Once again the Eduskeptic must point out that young doesn’t equal better, it only equals cheaper. This is not to say that older teachers should be exempt from the pink slip dance. More experienced doesn’t always equal better either.

The trauma caused by the yearly lay off notices is pretty heavy. In small districts, it is usually the principal who will call in those who will be laid off, and let them know to expect the notice. Generally this is in advance of the actual notice. In large districts, the notice generally arrives in the form of a registered letter. Either way, the blow to those who receive them is like being kicked in the stomach by a mule. Tears flow, anxiety flares, spirits plummet.

Each year when this happens an unknown number of good teachers just give up and move to other professions. Given that somewhere around 30% to 40% of new teachers quit within 3 years of entering the classroom anyway (Rhee and Vanderhoek, among the many), this amounts to a very serious drain of good, talented teachers we can ill afford to lose. Those who simply discover that the classroom isn’t a place they are willing to devote a career to are wise to run away. Those who give up after a series of pink slips represent a loss to the profession.

School districts cannot manufacture money. The national agenda, while making an entire catalog of sound bites about various reforms, has thus far failed to address adequate funding that would preclude the annual “your services are not needed next year” trauma.

One desperately hopes that the serious discussions are the ones we aren’t hearing about. This would be because those involved in the serious type of discussions aren’t looking to fund a corporation or make political points with any particular group. They would be looking to actually foster a more stable method of attracting and retaining good teachers.

To all of my colleagues who are dealing with the aftermath and trauma of receiving a pink slip I can only offer my sympathy and fervent hope that you will be recalled to the classroom. We need you.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything.

60 Minutes aired an interview with Zeke Vanderhoek on March 13. Vanderhoek is a former teacher who is now the founder and principal of a charter school in New York City.

The school is called The Equity Project or TEP. It is a charter school that opened in 2009. The school pays its teachers $125,000 per year, with the possibility of bonuses depending on how the student do. It isn’t clear if the teachers are offered benefits or contribute to the teachers pension fund.

The apparent idea of the $125,00o is to attract the most motivated teachers to apply. It is double the average salary of other teachers in New York City. There is no evidence, however, that paying teachers more money has any effect on their teaching.

The charter school doesn’t get more money than other schools. What it does get is the ability to spend the money differently. The classrooms are portables. There is no assistant principal (with less than 250 students, why would there be?), reading specialist or other staff that a regular school might have.

Vanderhoek claims a vigorous hiring process and the complete discretion to hire and fire at will. The standards, according to him, are high. The school is in the Washington Heights area, a predominately poor Hispanic and African American neighborhood.

Vanderhoek taught for three years  at Intermediate School 90 in Washington Heights through the Teach for America program. It is unclear if he earned tenure during his brief time teaching. During that time he created Manhattan GMAT. He did this in 2000. It is a test prep corporation. In January of 2007 he stepped down as the CEO in order to pursue the TEP charter.

Whether TEP survives or not is an open question. While Vanderhoek claims very vigorous standards for the teachers, and the school pays them well (shouldn’t all teachers be paid well?), the test scores of the students aren’t very good. There are of course plenty of excuses as to the reason.

What Vanderhoek did at the end of the first school year was fire two teachers. They just weren’t good enough, not cutting it. How Vanderhoek would know is anyone’s guess. He spent a scant three years as a classroom teacher before heading to the corporate trough.

He never made it past the rookie stage. It takes at least four years to earn tenure in most states. He appears to be another aspiring teacher who couldn’t imagine himself in a classroom full of children for the next 30 years or so and opted instead to abandon the classroom in favor of building a corporate career, ala Michelle Rhee and others.

Couric, in her interview with Vanderhoek, after noting the high pay, dismal results and the firing of the not-cutting-it teachers, had the presence of mind to ask Vanderhoek this  question: “You’re the head of the school, the principal. Why do you get to keep your job?”

As if blind to his earlier statements about how rigorous the standards are at TEP for everyone, he answered: “Ultimately to build an excellent organization is going to take time. And if that doesn’t happen let’s say four years from now, then I shouldn’t keep my job.” Oddly enough, the charter is only good for four more years.

The sheer hypocrisy of Vanderhoek’s statement is difficult to imagine. The teachers, who are being judged by a rookie who spent a mere 3 school years as a real teacher, are fired after one year if he decides they aren’t good enough. He, however, grants himself the entire 5 year span of the charter to do well.There seems to be a cognitive disconnect going on here.

In addition, he says that tenure should be abolished, on the grounds that no one should be granted a position for life. It is quite obvious from this statement that he is completely ignorant as to what tenure is. No teacher has ever been granted a job for life. Tenure, earned after 3 or 4 years in the classroom, simply grants due process rights to the teacher. Nothing more, nothing less.

Couric also spoke with Joel Klien, who lost his job as head of the NYC schools last year. Like Vanderhoek, he doesn’t like tenure. His take on it? If you are breathing, you get tenure. Klien says it’s almost impossible to get rid of a bad teacher. That is an entirely questionable statement. Tenured teachers across the US are fired for incompetence every year.

What is clear to the Eduskeptic is this: Vanderhoek should, by his own standards for the teaching staff, be fired. His ultimate goal has nothing to do with education in the first place. He is busy building a future corporate position for himself.

As for Klien, and Vanderhoek too, what is clear is that there has been a gross failure of leadership, not tenure.

The recent attacks on unions, and especially teacher unions, seem to be an attempt to convince a target audience the unions are at fault for the economic cesspool we are all swimming in.

The rhetoric goes something like this: “The public unions are sucking the state/city coffers dry with their rich paychecks and pensions”, or some variation of this. Absent from the blather by people like Wisconsin’s governor Walker, and other governors and mayors, is any real data to support their claim.

While they do put out numbers, none of them square with the what’s real. It is political posturing that seems aimed more at union busting than anything else. An element of our society, content to simply nod their heads at whatever the political party they are affiliated with says, takes the bait, and repeats it as truth. A lie repeated often enough takes on a life of semi-respectability.

Scott Walker, in 2002, was elected Milwaukee County Executive. It was  during his eight year tenure that he found that he couldn’t dictate to the unions representing county workers. He actually had to engage in negotiations with them. He did not get what he wanted.

His election as Wisconsin’s Governor gave him another chance to show those pesky unions, especially those overpaid, pension rich teachers, who is boss. Through some very questionable and certainly unethical maneuvering, the republicans in the state government managed to strip the unions of some of their bargaining rights.

The problem is that the teachers and unions had, and have, nothing to do with the economic melt down.

In one state, California, the teachers unions, and their negotiated pensions, are fully funded for a minimum of 8 years, and possibly more than 15 years, depending on a single variable in projections. Other states reflect similar results if one only takes the time to dig a little.

Teachers pay into the retirement system, as does the state. The end result is a modest pension for teachers who work 25 to 30+ years in the classroom. No pension system is fully funded at any given time. It is supported each day by those still working and the investment decisions of the system. It’s not a mystery at all. Unless you want it to be.

The almost complete destruction of the worlds economy is 100% the fault of the greed mongers on Wall Street, the bond ratings agencies, and the entire real estate industry, from the agents on through the brokers, loan and title companies, banks, and appraisers. If the Eduskeptic has missed anyone in that system it is an oversight.

The big brokerage houses simply invented a method of creating something out of absolutely nothing, and then doing it again and again. The beginning and end result of what should have been an obviously unsupportable and unsustainable system was this: realtors agreed to sell houses to people who had no possible way to make the mortgage payments; the loan brokers and banks agreed to set these people up with the loans; the appraisers agreed to appraise the houses at whatever was being asked, the brokerage houses agreed to bundle the loans into “securities”, and everyone looked the other way. They were all making an enormous amounts of money.

People with no income, no assets, and no hope of paying a mortgage, found themselves the “owners” of $750,000 homes. It all fell apart at a predictable time, right when the very first teaser rate mortgages reset to the real rate, about 2 years after they were first made. Each year after that, more loans re-set, and more and more people defaulted. How this could be a surprise to anyone is a complete mystery.

How this calamity could ever be laid at the feet of unions, especially teachers unions, is an even bigger mystery. Unless, of course, the entire idea is to divert attention from what the real problems are.

It is simply a load of dung, if one is to be polite about it, shoveled by those who think that if we let big business do what they want, we’ll all be ok. Somehow, I don’t think that entirely works out too well.

As always, assume nothing, verify every thing. Do your own research. You might want to start with Michael Lewis’ latest book, The Big Short. Unless, of course, you’re content with just nodding your head.

In an appearance before Congress on March 9, Education Secretary Arne Duncan may have sounded the death knell for NCLB, or at least the stupid parts of it. He told Congress that 82 percent of America’s schools could fail to meet education goals set by No Child Left Behind this year.

He went on to say that NCLB it is broken and Congress needs to fix it now. A quote from Duncan: “This law has created dozens of ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed. We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk.”

It is refreshing to hear some common sense being injected into the debate about our school systems. His thoughts on NCLB, however, are not in any way new to anyone in the K-12 education field who took the time to look at the requirements.

At the small school district where the Eduskeptic taught Kindergarten for 24 years, we regularly devoted time during staff meetings to dissect the numbers that were generated by the testing we did. The grade levels at our school were K-4. Other schools in other districts across the U.S. did the same.

The results of the testing were plotted on a graph against the NCLB requirements. The NCLB trajectory line was a known factor, projected out to the end when everyone was expected to be at the proficient level. Defeating the bell curve, it is important to note, isn’t remotely possible.

What we could see was that during the first few years of NCLB the upward trajectory was pretty mild. Around about now, the line shot up. The requirements for success were much more difficult to meet.

Our children always did very well, overall. When we found problems we tackled them head on. We changed strategies, methods, materials to effect a positive change. Grade levels were very blunt about what needed to be done by other grade levels to reach the goals. No one, except maybe the Eduskeptic, wanted to be taken over by the Feds. The Eduskeptic thought it would be interesting to have them take over as soon as possible, just to show us how things were really supposed to be done.

What we could see was pretty simple. The federal trajectory of expectations was impossible to catch after a certain point. The Eduskeptic isn’t especially mathematically inclined, but he did some simple projections to find out whether our students test scores could make the rapid upward tick that kicks in now.

Just to make sure, the Eduskeptic checked with a colleague, another Kindergarten teacher who is a math whiz, about his data. My reasoning and methods were correct. Over one morning recess, the reality of this catch 22 was confirmed by my colleague. There was simply no possible way, using our available data, to project a line that would meet the NCLB requirements. None. Zero. Barring a wholesale import of 100% genius level elementary students, we would fail.

Secretary Duncan is absolutely correct in his assessment of NCLB. It offers no way to win. There was, and is, only the very real probability that no matter what a school did, sooner or later it would fall into the failed category.

It is almost impossible to imagine that at least 82% of the schools in the United States are actually failing to adequately educate their students. While this may fit into the political sloganeering of some groups, it’s not real. NCLB simply projected a goal that had absolutely no basis in fact, and then proclaimed that not meeting the goal meant that schools were failing. It is, by any standard, absurd.

There is always room for improvement in any school system. The focus must be on how to improve rather than how to blame and punish. Whatever perceived good that NCLB was supposed to offer is more than offset by the damage done by failing to present any reasonable way to succeed.

Secretary Duncan is right. The Eduskeptic hopes that Congress listens and acts accordingly.

As always, assume nothing, verify everything. Do your own research.