Lessons learned?

Yesterday, the Star Tribune had an editorial about Bad marks on the 'nation's report card’. Among other points raised:

In addition to the math and reading scores, a survey administered along with the NAEP exams indicated that chronic absenteeism and mental health challenges are growing problems among American students — both negative indicators for academic achievement.

That strongly suggests the source(s) of the problem lie(s) somewhere other than with instructional methods. Regardless, this past session, the Minnesota Legislature, that bastion of well-informed clear thinking folks, saw fit to specify in law instructional methods for reading. According to MinnPost:

Transformational was a word used a lot this session, but it might be most apt for changes made to how the state teaches young students to read. What had been known as the reading wars has been settled with the state mandating new curricula that embrace what is known as evidence-based teaching or the science of reading. Either way, it will require returning to phonics-based instruction in early years and also creates and pays for interventions to diagnose dyslexia and other reading disabilities and to measure student progress in reading.

I noted in social media a number of folks who strongly disagree(d) with the approach incorporated in the legislation.

Then there’s the continuing emphasis on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) which, some of us think, would better serve the individual and economy and civil society if it were revised to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math). College, the last I checked, was envisioned as more than an expensive tech school, which is what it becomes if the arts and humanities are limited to diminished roles in education. Where in STEM does one to learn to interpret and apply the meaning of the phrase “All men are created equal,” in Math because it says “equal?”

table top at Minneapolis’ Center for the Book

Photo by J. Harrington

Now that SCOTUS has brought attention to the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, I’m curious if anyone can point to a well done comparative analysis of how it is that, recently, women outnumbered men in secondary school enrollment, since not that long ago women weren’t even allowed to vote or enroll in many elite institutions and yet, as far as I know, women were not  the focus of affirmative action. This entire situation reminds me of something the folks in systems dynamics observed many years ago:

The systems analysis community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point — in inventory policy, maybe, or in the relationship between sales force and productive force, or in personnel policy. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!”

If you look at the front page of almost any news outlet almost anywhere in the world these days, you’ll find distressing evidence that we’re alll still pushing in the wrong direction while arguing about whose fault that is. Once again we wonder, along with Liz Cheney, how it is we can stop electing idiots while still allowing “idiots” to vote.

School

By Daniel J. Langton

I was sent home the first day

with a note: Danny needs a ruler.

My father nodded, nothing seemed so apt.

School is for rules, countries need rulers,

graphs need graphing, the world is straight ahead.

It had metrics one side, inches the other.

You could see where it started

and why it stopped, a foot along,

how it ruled the flighty pen,

which petered out sideways when you dreamt.

I could have learned a lot,

understood latitude, or the border with Canada,

so stern compared to the South

and its unruly river with two names.

But that first day, meandering home, I dropped it.

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