The Educated Society

Instead of deriding the one percent as being out of touch with the rest of us, maybe we can learn something from them–like how to improve our children’s educational success. Dr. Sean Reardon, a Stanford professor of education and sociology, believes that high-income parents are enriching their children’s educational opportunities, from the day they are born, in ways that no school or teacher can duplicate. And he’s right. Improving teachers and schools are undoubtedly essential, but what really seems to make a difference is improving the quality of parenting, because they affect children’s earliest environments.

What brought about this conclusion? The widening income gap. Dr. Reardon believes that this troubling trend reflects a deeper issue. He points to the increasing gap in SAT scores between the rich (90th percentile of income distribution) and the poor (10th percentile) — from 90 points in 1980 to 125 points today, which is almost twice as large as the 70 point test score gap between black and white children.

Overall, schools actually do their part to help. Math scores on the NAEP tests (“the nation’s report card”), for example, have trended upwards over the past few decades (even though reading scores are much less impressive). In fact, schools generally narrow the rich-poor achievement gap during the nine months that students are in attendance. During the summer, however, the gap is magnified. Wealthy students engage in stimulating experiences like volunteering, camping, and traveling that are significantly better than those even in middle class! Those in poverty, of course, have almost none.

Because affluence has grown rapidly over the last few decades, “the rich now outperform the middle class by as much as the middle class outperform the poor,” according to Reardon. This includes not just in academics, but also in extracurricular activities like sports, volunteer work, and church attendance. All because high-income families focus their resources on their children’s cognitive development and educational success. Social scientists often refer to this phenomenon as the “Matthew effect” or the “multiplier effect,” where certain advantages are leveraged to gain even more advantages. The result is an insurmountable gap.

So in the end, the readiness of poor (and middle class) children, or the lack of opportunities, is the real issue. The implications? Policymakers should focus more on what high-income families are doing and duplicate these efforts for disadvantaged children. Reardon specifically recommends investing in parents and helping them be better teachers themselves, a theme The Educated Society has long embraced. Only when parents understand the importance of reading to their children, cooking healthier meals, and giving children diverse experiences can we even the playing field. This, of course, is a societal issue.

The problem arises when an individualistic society becomes reluctant to part with resources to help the less fortunate. The fortunate can sometimes forget that the less fortunate are partly victims of circumstances. For instance, how can poor parents know the benefits of reading to their kids if they’ve  never been read to? An individualistic society founded on the the Protestant work ethic and the Horatio Algiers story can afford to rely on individual gumption because they’ve been blessed with an environment that fosters it. Willpower is overrated. Losing weight or reducing crime, for the most part, is not due to higher levels of determination; but rather to the systems and supports in place that foster progress. In other words, we need to create the right culture. That’s why creating a culture of education should be be our highest priority.

In the absence of this culture, “pockets of excellence” exists that are unsustainable. Duplicating what the “one-percent” do (e.g., focusing resources on child’s development and educational success) by creating systems that build parental capacity  will lead to lasting change. I’m curious to see what will become of President Obama’s early childhood initiatives.

No matter our ideology, education will always be closely linked with a nation’s economy. We saw a ramping up of science and math education during the Sputnik era in the 1950s-1960s, another call for rigorous standards when fears emerged about international competition from Japan (and Germany) in the 1980s. Of course, the past decade has been all about meeting the demands of the global 21st century knowledge-based economy under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the call for more STEM education.

Too bad. The “excellence” march will always trump the “equity” one when a nation’s economy is at stake. Such initiatives might make us economically and militarily powerful, but not necessarily a better nation. Once countries reach “maturity,” (i.e., industrialization or advanced development stage), they need a more post-modern approach that considers its people and its responsibility to the world. And that requires a socially-conscious approach to education.

Countries that are rapidly developing in order to catch up the the U.S., such as China, India, and Brazil, will generally forgo social/environmental progress in order to reach economic ones, which is exactly what we did in the middle of the 20th century. Environmental concerns and civil rights didn’t come about until after World War II, when the world recognized this period as “the American Century.” We can afford to be more socially and ecologically aware when we’re at the top, while other countries will probably follow our footsteps as they progress. Yet the gini coefficient indicates an economic inequality not seen since the Great Depression (not to mention social and political polarity). Nothing exemplifies this zeitgist more than Occupy Wall Street.

Do other countries want to follow this American Dream? Maybe not.

As nation’s are seeking to define their place in the world, they may not necessarily want what we have; some in fact resent it. Thomas Friedman’s recent article in the New York Times, entitled China Needs Its Own Dream, pointed to the conscious change that many Chinese citizens are making in shaping their 21st century identity. Peggy Liu, the founder of the Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy, argues that the Chinese today are yearning to create a new national identity, one that merges traditional Chinese values like balance, respect, and flow, with its new modern urban reality.

China’s latest five-year plan is based on sustainability for its burgeoning middle class that seeks to counter the growing conspicuous consumerism. The younger generation does not necessarily want to follow the typical growth path–the rising consumption, “now it’s our turn” kind of mentality–that Americans went through.

Instead, the creation of a “Chinese Dream” that redefines personal prosperity by merging the unique traditional Chinese values with the burgeoning urbanization to create more access to better products and services–not necessarily owning them–so everyone gets a piece of the pie. This includes better public transportation, spaces, housing, e-learning, and e-commerce. For a society, isn’t “better access for all” preferable to “exclusive ownership”? It’s certainly greener and infinitely more egalitarian.

This socially conscious mindset amongst its students appears to be more prevalent as well. One student Friedman interviewed, Zhou Lin, said that it was in China’s best interest to find a “cleaner” growth path.

Part of this change, I believe is that they spend a lot of time reflecting on what other nations have done as a blueprint for success (such as America’s innovation and higher education) and on what dangers to avoid (e.g., American social values). No doubt they want to define their own path to trumpet as a 21st model to emulate. A lot will be riding on the new leadership’s ability to address increasing prosperity and inequality.

For the U.S., the current education culture is exclusively focused on maintaining economic hegemony and STEM competitiveness. Where is the socially conscious models that George Counts and Nel Noddings advocated for? Despite the calls to close the achievement gap, it seems far too much is placed on standards and testing in the interest of economic expediency. Perhaps excellence in education for the 21st century should consider more of the socially-conscious and heterogeneous model that values individual growth and global collaboration.

Why is it that the business people who are increasingly influencing education policy do not follow the doctrines that have made them successful in their industry? Chief among them is how executives and managers allocate limited time and resources on the things that generate the biggest returns, not on the least profitable ones.

This metaphor is particularly relevant now, given the pervasive influence of business practices in schools. Powerful forces within this industry, whether they be individuals (e.g., Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg) or private foundations (e.g. the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation, and of course the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) have shaped education reform in unprecedented and sometimes misguided ways. The relentless focus on teacher accountability is one such reform lifted straight out of the business world. In theory, it was a godsend concept whose time had come, given the bureaucratic failings of both the public school system and the teachers’ union over the past three decades.

So if teacher accountability is the reform du jour of business-minded politicians and reformers, one would think that teachers, more than any other possible factor, have the greatest influence on student outcome.

This is simply not true.

Most empirical studies consistently reveal that teacher quality, though the biggest in-school variable, accounts for no more than 20 percent of student outcomes (in some cases as low as 10 percent, according to education economist Eric Hanushek). In fact, non-school factors, such as the home environment and the family, along with culture and SES, play larger roles. Famed sociologist James Coleman confirmed the importance of a balanced perspective in one of the largest education study in the 20th century, the Equality of Educational Opportunity, which found that academic achievement was due more to the mixed factors of the school composition, student perception of his environment and future, verbal skills of the teacher, and particularly student background. These four major factors clearly included both in-school and non-school factors.

Simply put, children from birth to age 18 also spend less than 20 percent of their time in school. Based on calculating 7 hours per school day over 180 days per school year for 13 years (starting from age 5 to age 18 when most children start pre-K and graduate, respectively) the figure comes out even lower: 10 percent. With NAEP (considered the nation’s report card and the gold standard of assessments) scores showing little significant improvement compared with 2009 (particularly in reading), the decision to focus on teacher evaluations and performance pay over other non-school factors constitutes an inefficient use of capital at best, and gross mismanagement at worst.

Figuratively speaking, if student outcome is the deliverable, and the Department of Education the publicly traded company, then surely the board of directors, who represent the interests of the company’s shareholders, would hold upper management accountable. The parents, as both the board and the stakeholders, are already gaining political power to demand leadership changes in failing schools, particularly in California and Texas. Their accountability is just as crucial as those of teachers. The Educational Testing Service (ETS), in fact, called the family “America’s smallest school.”

Merely investing in teacher effectiveness to the exclusion of non-school factors is not a profitable executive decision, particularly if teachers account for a fraction of student performance. Part of the misallocated funds would be better spent on the front end recruiting top talent and comprehensively training and supporting teachers as the Finns have done with astonishing success — than counterproductively on the back end; only then will teachers be truly professionals, as I have argued previously.

Smart businesses invest first in research and development to create the best products. In education, parents are the R&D equivalent who nurture and develop habits of mind to create a school-ready child. Here is where investing in eradicating poverty and building community and family partnerships can have the most substantial, efficient, and long term impact. To maximize return, this is where business insight would best serve education.

Rationally speaking, people should make decisions based on sound, scientific evidence, especially when it comes to policy. The No Child Left Behind Act was one example of such “evidence-based education,” which was supposed to integrate professional wisdom with solid empirical evidence in making decisions about how to deliver instruction. Though its focus on accountability is laudable, The Department of Education’s limited focus on performance (students and teachers) displays an alarming ignorance of the conditions required for real learning and achievement to take place, especially if innovation is the 21st century goal.

A similar parochialism seems to also afflict the government (as well as pundits and the general public) in other areas of policy (e.g., economic, social, public health, and foreign), which reflects America’s identity struggle dating back to its inception. Essentially, there have always been two conflicting interpretations of the American ideals of freedom and democracy. On the one hand, the founding fathers (such as Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison) were polymaths who felt that the health of democracy depended on an educated citizenry; this perspective reflected their Enlightenment upbringing. The other segment believed too much education might produce an inequality that would violate the very democratic ideals that education was supposed to foster, reflected in part by the rising influence of fundamental evangelism at the end of the revolutionary era. It viewed excessive devotion to learning as a secular threat that would interfere with or contradict biblical exegesis and serve as an obstacle to personal salvation. (Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-intellectualism in American Life and Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason traced the roots of the American ethos — religion and secularization, democratic ideology, and the idealization of the self-made man — to explain America’s current decline. Also read my previous post on this topic, Tracing the Roots of our Malaise.)

Scientific conclusions, though, can be just as capricious as one’s intuition. Recently, two surprising health studies questioned the validity of vitamin supplements. The first one, known as the SELECT study, found that participants receiving Vitamin E had a 17% increased risk of prostate cancer. The second study, which examined the effects of multivitamin on older women, found an increased risk of dying of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Both conclusions contradict long-held beliefs about the benefits of vitamins and only serve to make beneficial choices even more maddening. So what rule of thumb can we use to aid in decision-making, especially when it involves contrasting scientific evidence?

Consider the bell-curve.

As many people are aware, the bell-curve is a theory of probability in statistics that explains how things in life are distributed. Under normal circumstances, everything generally falls into this distribution in the following fashion: the majority of cases comprise the middle, sandwiched by a smaller minority at the top (the exceptional) and the bottom (the worst). If considering income distribution, the largest portion of people would fall in the middle class, with a much smaller portion that are either wealthy or destitute. Almost everything else in life and in nature that can be measured falls into this normal distribution, including academic achievement, intelligence, political views, and physical size. Statistically, about 68% tends to fall in the middle (as depicted in the figure below as green), 28% comprises the blue portions on opposite ends of the middle (14% each side), and finally 4% represent the yellow at the extreme top and bottom (or left and right, depending on your perspective). This roughly accounts for 100% of cases. The bell curve is a relative indicator of trend, or where we stand.

So how can this help us be better decision-makers?

If one study has a significant and new finding, do not accept it as truth yet. The same can apply if one person asserts an unorthodox statement; much like the exceptional 2% found in bell curves, it could be an exception or anomaly. If two or more studies (or people) have similar conclusions, start to pay attention. And if even more studies arrive at the same conclusion, it is safe to assume its validity for the most part, since it is no longer the exception. In other words, look at the entire body of evidence on the topic, not just one study (or even two). Once its conclusion is echoed enough times, it will fall into the 68% majority distribution, where it is pretty much accepted as fact, much like long-established conclusion of the dangers of smoking.

Let’s look at health studies on cell phone radiation as an example. There are currently mixed conclusions; some say the danger is unwarranted as long as emitted radiation is below federal standards, but more than a few studies have pointed to health concern. I for one would heed its warnings. Same with recent studies asserting the hazards of the standard American diet (SAD) — one that emphasizes meat and dairy to the detriment of vegetables, fruits, and grains. It is certainly enough to warrant a change in eating habits. New studies always start at the extreme ends of the bell-curve, but move towards the middle as subsequent studies validate its conclusions. This is why observing the overall trend is so crucial to making better decisions; trends can be fickle. Finding where it is on the distribution scale is the key.

The applicability of the bell curve is not just limited to research; it can be applied to every aspect in life: What political candidate should I vote for? What is the healthiest way to eat or exercise? What’s the best way to raise children? How do I make myself stand apart from all the applicants? The answers are surely complex, but seeing the broad range of answers (whether through online search, professional consultation, etc.), helps one to discern consistent themes that are echoed or validated.

Following the bell-curve is not the same as advocating for moderation, however. Though such conventional wisdom is part of this blog’s raison d’être, moderating one’s perspective only considers the degree of action (or inaction), but not whether something should be done in the first place. For example, the rule of moderation may help one decide how much to exercise or to drink, but not whether or not to try drugs. The bell curve, with its inclusion of outliers, can account for the percentage of those who have not tried them as well as how much for those who have.

The bell curve is also not the same thing as following the majority, though there can be wisdom in numbers. The majority can be mislead and is sometimes wrong, especially when it is isolated. An adolescent who is pressured to smoke by his circle of friends needs to step outside his perspective to see the folly of the crowd. A Los Angeles teen whose peers consider plastic surgery as “no big deal” should explore other segments of the country and world where it’s never even heard of. Sometimes the majority perspective can even be too conventional, requiring inspired thinking. The bell-curve accounts for this diversity — the whole 100% distribution. It includes seeing and acknowledging the anomalies and outliers (the 4% extremes), as well as the other segment (the still substantial 28%) that falls outside of the majority. Ironic how understanding the bell curve can allow one to see, for example, the parochialism of popular culture (or the masses) for what it really is.

Despite the above concerns, recognizing the majority 68% can also be comforting. Within the din of contemporary American politics, where media coverage has been devoted to the extremes of Tea Party politics on the one end and Occupy Wall Street protesters on the other, it is reassuring to know that Americans are quite moderate in their political views for the most part; that both personal responsibility and public support is needed to raise America from its recent woes. 81% believe America is on the wrong track, 71% believe the country is in decline, and 89% believe that politicians should compromise on major issues like the deficit than take a hard line, according to a Time poll. It’s the same reason why a good economy rests on a robust middle class. (Read more about this silent majority in Joe Klein’s Middle of the Road.)

The bell curve is a constructive guide, but for it to work effectively, there has to be three considerations. First, the source of information must be valid; hence why respected research journals are peer-reviewed and subject to random sampling. If they are not, there is potential for bias. It is also why credible researchers and journalists triangulate their data by checking different sources — via inquiry, observations, and third party interviews.

Second, one should always maintain a healthy dose of skepticism, no matter how well a scientific finding is established. This general mindset, which philosopher Bertrand Russell advocated for in collection entitled Sceptical Essays, is at the root of objectivity.

Third, when confronting ambiguity, one should strive to follow “the flow of nature.” If one is unsure about the validity of conclusions drawn from cell phone radiation studies, for example, then perhaps looking at what is done in nature can inform us; in this case, machine usage is probably best kept to a minimal. What about eating a vegetarian diet compared with an omnivorous one? This goes back to the aforementioned American diet; a tougher question to answer, as all kinds of eaters exist in nature.  However, looking at the longevity of turtles and other herbivores might point us towards a more whole-foods diet that relies less on meat consumption.

In the end, the bell-curve is a heuristic tool. By considering all the possible answers that lie on the bell curve, one can discover the most optimal decision to make. Sometimes it means following the majority, and other times the minority. That self-discovery is what broadens the mind.

As a former advertising executive, I learned an important lesson: Know your target audience.

It means that you need to get into the minds of whoever you are selling to. For example, advertisers ask questions like: Why do people want to buy an iPhone instead of a Blackberry? Why should one use an online bank over a brick and mortar one? More importantly, What problem do they have that we can solve? And Why should they care about our product?

When a consumer sees that a company “gets” them (i.e., by clearly communicating the problem that she is facing), she might be more amenable to the company’s solution (i.e., our smartphone is easy to use and looks great, or our bank offers more money back and no annoying fees, etc.).

It’s a simple lesson that most people know, but people rarely apply this to other parts of their life. Sometimes, marketers forget this too (see an intriguing video about how condom marketers failed to understand the Congolese mindset). It boggles my mind when I see someone presenting in front of a group and completely boring the audience (which I believe is most of the time). The simple reason isn’t necessarily because the presenter is a poor speaker, but because he is not engaging the audience’s interest. He should be asking himself questions such as, What do they care about? How can I make it easier for them to be engaged?

The same goes for an employee communicating with a boss (or vice versa), a teacher engaging her students, parents teaching a child, and even a politician trying to raise campaign funds. Knowing your audience is the only thing you can control, and in some cases, the economic well-being of our nation depends on it.

Recently, the U.S. has been considering sanctions against China for devaluing its currency, essentially putting us at a trade disadvantage. China’s products have been costing less to produce and export while costing ours more — bad, if we want the world’s second largest economy to buy our stuff. It also encourages the export of American jobs (due to cheaper labor costs in China), which hurts our economy. The problem only arises, however, if the U.S. decides to impose sanctions that force China into revaluing its currency as a way to rescue American jobs.

Forget the fact that China is in the driver’s seat and knows that America is desperate. By passing a bill hinting at stiff tariffs, the U.S. Senate is taking coercive action that could lead to a disastrous trade war — all because we don’t know the target audience. As Rana Foroohar, the Curious Capitalist writer for Time warned: “If you really want the Chinese to do something, never pressure them about it in public. Loss of face is anathema in the Middle Kingdom.” In fact, it has made them even more defiant, lowering the renminbi even more.

This is why an educated society is so crucial — ignorance of cultural sensitivities goes against the golden rule in advertising. You cannot sell them something if you don’t know them. Better approach it the way Henry Kissinger did in the 1970s, through closed-doored cooperation that allows the Chinese to maintain their dignity and harmony with the U.S. Wouldn’t employees prefer private one-on-one conversations with management over misunderstandings instead of public grievances? How about students or teachers at a principal’s office? Or a coach-athlete dispute in the locker room instead of in front of the press?

Hearing Republican primary candidates like Gov. Mitt Romney in the GOP debate recently insist on public sanctions on China makes him appear unworldly in a global stage, which can further damage America’s image. However, his opponent, Jon Huntsman — a former U.S. ambassador to China — has shown a more nuanced understanding in his answers (which goes back to my theory that informed people tend to be worldly travelers while the least informed tend to travel and live abroad much less — a future topic to address). Belligerent posturing will get nowhere with an emerging superpower that has endured centuries of humiliation and submission.

In fact, cultural context is so essential that it can even affect conclusions drawn from cross-cultural research studies, as I discovered recently. In surveys given to diverse students, I found that Asian students appeared to score themselves lower on various questions of ability, despite the fact that there is little discernible differences in such. Reviews of past research reveal that they tend to underestimate their abilities and uniqueness (compared with Americans or westerners) due to of their Confucian culture of modesty. This phenomenon is called self-effacing bias. In fact, there was a 1991 study that compared perceptions of Japanese undergraduate students with American counterparts on estimations of one’s intellectual ability. An American student, on average, felt only 30% of his university’s peers have higher abilities than himself, compared with 50% for a Japanese student. This sense of false-uniqueness can affect the validity of any study if one’s responses are colored by complicated factors such as cultural and personal orientation. Something to keep in mind next time a political candidate offers simple solutions to complex problems.

The bottom line: own your target audience by knowing everything about what makes them tick; this mindset is part of having a broader and wiser perspective. Without it, we are just living in our own world — a parochialism that I fear is becoming an increasing part of the American identity.

The National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) has presented a new paper that appears to understand what is needed to improve American education, titled Standing on the Shoulder of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform.

Notably, its recommendations are free of solutions that characterize much of current debates such as charter schools, teacher accountability, merit pay, de-unionization of teachers and other misguided market-based panaceas propagated by many politicians and non-educators.

The author, Marc Tucker, presents the contrasting approaches of five high-performing countries: Canada, Finland, Singapore, Japan, and China (Shanghai). Though different, all of them have developed a balanced, comprehensive, and unified system of education contrary to that of the United States, where:

1) Teachers are rigorously screened, trained (with apprenticeship periods under master teachers), and supported — and thus professionalized and paid comparatively well;

2) Funds are spent more on the neediest students, who are diagnosed at the first sign of trouble and thoroughly supported by the best teachers, not the least experienced;

3) The national curriculum goes far beyond mathematics and the home language, covering the sciences, the social sciences, the arts and music, and often, religion, morals or, in the case of Finland, philosophy; they tend to strike the right balance between high-level content mastery, problem-solving ability, and the ability to demonstrate a capacity for independent thought, creativity and innovation;

4) High value is placed in their national policies on the mastery of complex skills and problem solving at a high level as opposed to mastery of basic skills; as a result, there is less multiple-choice standardized tests that are scored by computers, allowing teachers autonomy and authority to instruct and create; and

5) National control over funding is designed to distribute resources in ways intended to enable all students to achieve high standards.

One of the things I found most fascinating was how Tucker compared the different management paradigms between the U.S. and other countries using the two great management gurus in the last century – Frederick Taylor, who codified the methods of scientific management, and Peter Drucker, who embraced a knowledge economy. The former’s style epitomized the era of mass production and how manufacturing products can be streamlined with little skill. This outmoded style is similar to the way America’s education system trains its teachers in order to produce students who merely meet basic proficiency. On the other hand, countries like Singapore and Finland prize the professionals’ ability to apply their knowledge to challenges faced every day, one that Drucker deemed crucial in a knowledge-based economy. Unfortunately, our education system is not geared to meet such 21st century needs.

I have some minor criticisms of this paper. One is the NCEE’s recommendation to apply these changes only on a state, not national level. Education is seen as a national issue in the top-performing countries, where the curriculum is unified and funding is equally allocated. How can we create such collective improvements through individual state control? Second, though Tucker’s recommendations are limited to school-based changes, there needs to be concurrent social and family policy changes that would facilitate a culture of education in the U.S. (particularly for disadvantaged children). In other words, children need to be school-ready: well-fed, motivated, and eager to learn. This comes mainly from family and culture. Without students in the right frame of mind and body, top-down changes are useless.

In the end, the NCEE was “struck by the attention that [was] being given to achieving clarity and consensus on the goals for education in those countries.” I had previously called for an overarching mission statement for American eduction. Following a focused goal and the NCEE’s recommendation as a blueprint, schools can take its first real step towards an educated society. Will our leaders listen?

Standing on the Shoulder of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform

What is the mission statement for American education?

America’s middling scores on the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has spotlighted the conflicted state of American education. Is it in need of improvement and/or reform? Are these scores a reflection of our high poverty rate, as pointed by Diane Ravitch and countless others, or of our misguided and feckless system?

Clearly, both do matter, but poverty is a larger social issue that must be addressed outside of the educational jurisdiction. The school system itself, however, is facing an identity crisis brought on by several disparate trends: increased accountability for students, a growing emphasis on teacher effectiveness, and calls for more market-based solutions (such as vouchers and charter schools). The ensuing polarization of these debates have led to diluted solutions that have not decreased the achievement gap locally or globally. Though it is a vital institution, the nation’s public schools has not inspired much confidence.

At this point it is worthwhile to reflect on America’s educational goal. What do we want? Better critical thinkers or better innovators? Is it more important to produce a collective and active citizenry or self-actualized individuals (fulfilling one’s potential)? Is it all of the above?

Such articulation is necessary, as it will be drive the direction of education reform and improvements. If the goal is to create actualized and critical-thinking citizens, then a broad-based curriculum that includes the arts, sciences, ethics, etc. is essential. Think of the liberal education in antiquity. However, if citizens are seen as economic wards of the state, then an emphasis on STEM education with an eye towards innovation probably makes better sense. Philosophers and education purists like Socrates, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell might point to the former, but historically, educational goals have closely aligned with short term national interests. Obama’s innovation imperative to compete in the global economy is no different. (As a side note, an increasing trend of international migration in the new economy is hastening a class of global citizens and obsolescing the the concept of nation-state citizen. Something to keep in mind when considering whether nationalism is a worthy end goal in education.)

Is America’s educational vision clear? Federal and state education departments have done a poor job articulating that goal, which is part of the reason why the aforementioned initiatives are ineffective, polarizing, and misguided. What are we even working towards?

The Department of Education needs a mission statement.

Companies have a mission statement to clarify their purpose, and all subsequent decisions, actions, and goals are measured against that statement. This is the primary benchmark, and its mission should come across during any transaction with a customer. Here are some examples of effective company mission statements:

Southwest Airlines: The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit.

Harley Davidson: We fulfill dreams through the experience of motorcycling, by providing to motorcyclists and to the general public an expanding line of motorcycles and branded products and services in selected market segments.

Google: Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Apple: Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.

To a large extent, every one of these statements ring true to its employees and its customers; it comes across in their advertising and service. Ask any Apple aficionado three qualities that describe its products and innovative, high quality, and peerless user experience will consistently come up. Similarly, unparalleled customer service is synonymous with Southwest Airlines for its patrons.

Is the mission of America’s public education system as easy to articulate?

The federal DOE website revealed its main role in strengthening commitment, promoting improvements and involvements that will facilitate access to equal education. Not exactly inspiring, yet unsurprising given their limited powers in education matters. Most if not all state education department and individual schools have their own mission statements, which only further muddles the national focus. How do we reach the goal if we don’t even know what it is?

NCLB’s goal to ensure that all students are “proficient” in English Language Arts and Math by 2014 can’t be the ultimate goal for America; it would be laughably short-sighted and misguided when compared to the enduring goals of other high-achieving countries’ education systems:

Finland: …Basic education must provide an opportunity for diversified growth, learning, and the development of a healthy sense of self-esteem, so that the pupils can obtain the knowledge and skills they need in life, become capable of further study, and, as involved citizens, develop a democratic society. Basic education must also support each pupil’s linguistic and cultural identity and the development of his or her mother tongue. A further objective is to awaken a desire for lifelong learning…

Singapore: The wealth of a nation lies in its people – their commitment to country and community, their willingness to strive and persevere, their ability to think, achieve and excel. Our future depends on our continually renewing and regenerating our leadership and citizenry, building upon the experience of the past, learning from the circumstances of the present, and preparing for the challenges of the future. How we bring up our young at home and teach them in school will shape Singapore in the next generation.

The mission of the Education Service is to mould the future of the nation, by moulding the people who will determine the future of the nation. The Service will provide our children with a balanced and well-rounded education, develop them to their full potential, and nurture them into good citizens, conscious of their responsibilities to family, society and country.

South Korea‘s Ministry of Education vision articulates building a first class advanced country through science and technology.

With these statements clearly elucidated, any needed reform would work in service to those goals. For the United States, articulating a federal a vision and/or mission statement would provide a similar blueprint that would constructively focus the national discussion and potentially diminish political rhetoric. Here is my suggestion:

The mission of the US Department of Education is to provide equal access and support to high quality education for America’s children. Its service will cultivate self-growth and critical abilities to build upon our nation’s innovative heritage towards improving citizen life through dignity, respect, and cooperation.

This statement capitalizes on America’s unique strengths — its diversity and entrepreneurial spirit — but also emphasizes the need to treat its global neighbors honorably. With this vision and mission established, reform can then be more constructively addressed. Let’s start from the beginning.

Education researcher Esther Quintero lucidly dissected the inherently illogical foundations of current reform efforts in the Shanker Blog, entitled The Un-American Foundations of Our Education Debate. Her perspective mirrored my own about the misplaced emphasis on teacher accountability without a concurrent one on student and family accountability (see my article, Conservatives: What Happened to Personal Responsibility?). Here is her article in it’s entirety.

Being from Spain, one of the first things that struck me as odd about the U.S. education debate was the ubiquitous depiction of “bad teachers” as the villains of education and “great teachers” as its saviors. Aside from the fact that this view is simplistic, the punish/praise-teachers chorus seemed particularly off-key—but I wasn’t sure why. I think I may have figured it out. I think that it may be un-American.

Let me explain. This is a nation that is supposed to be built around specific core values, such as individual effort, hard work, and taking responsibility for one’s own actions. If so, isn’t the fixation on teachers—to the seeming exclusion of students and parents—an indirect rejection of basic American principles?

This is not a discussion of what the good/bad teacher doctrine misses —we know it misses numerous dimensions of the education enterprise—but rather, what this doctrine assumes and how these assumptions conflict with the values that one expects most Americans to hold.

One problem with the narrow focus on teachers is that it views students exclusively as passive recipients of their own learning. Not to get too technical here, this goes back to a central question in the social sciences: namely, agency versus structure. Agency refers to the capacity of individuals to act independently and make their own choices. Structure refers to the conditions that shape and perhaps limit the range of alternative choices that are available. Western culture tends to favor agency over structure as an explanation for actions, a view which one would think would run particularly deep in the U.S.

Indeed, according to the World Values Survey, about 19 per cent of Americans were convinced (10, on a 1 to 10 point scale) that hard work ensures a better life, versus 11 per cent of Spaniards, and 13 per cent of Finns. Likewise, more than 21 per cent of Americans thought competition is good; only about 9 per cent of Spaniards thought the same. And, perhaps most revealingly, when asked why some people are “in need” 61 per cent of Americans attributed it to laziness and lack of will power; only 19 per cent of Spaniards agreed.  Taken together, these responses tend to support that Americans (certainly more so than Spaniards) are big believers in the American credo of effort, competition, and hard work bringing their own rewards.

To me, this is baffling. How can most Americans think that poor people are poor primarily because they are lazy, yet think that the children of the poor do poorly in school primarily because they have bad teachers? Something doesn’t quite click. In both cases, of course, a key explanation is missing: the structural component. That is, both downplay the importance of context, circumstances, institutions, etc. in explaining why bad outcomes occur and, thus, how they might be ameliorated. Poor people only have themselves to blame; kids have only their teachers—both are gross oversimplifications, but the latter also seems un-American in the sense that it indirectly portrays students as devoid of individual agency.

According to Diane Ravitch, “there was a time—which now seems distant—when most people assumed that students’ performance in school was largely determined by their own efforts and by the circumstances and support of their family, not by their teachers.” This is not that time.

Many, often competing, education reforms are on the table—i.e., developing new teacher evaluations and holding them more accountable, ending tenure, lowering class size, raising teacher salaries, adopting higher academic standards, and developing rich core curricula, to name a few. But the important issue of student effort seems now to be a missing ingredient in this debate. After all, isn’t it the student who must ultimately do the work of learning? Given the American credo, it is a puzzling omission. Parents, teachers, and peers influence student effort and motivation; but don’t kids deserve at least some of the credit when they do well and some of the blame when they do poorly? And, indeed, isn’t learning to be responsible one of the most important lessons of schooling?

According to some professors, the failure to learn this important life lesson causes problems all the way through college. This encounter with a student, described by Professor Brian B. Paul is but one example:

In the middle of a semester, one of my students in my developmental English course came to my office to tell me that he had to withdraw and that it was my fault. He couldn’t continue because my teaching style didn’t meet his needs. Foolishly, I asked for an explanation, and he spent the next five minutes outlining every instance in which I had interfered with his learning style, including by assigning homework, giving tests, taking attendance, and requiring that all essays be typed, printed out, and handed in at the very beginning of class. When I began to tell him that I do all of those things because I’m trying to teach academic responsibility, he interrupted and said, “You’re not letting me be me.”

At least in the early grades, a focusing on parents and teachers as the primary agents of schooling seems reasonable. But at what age do we start expecting students to assume some of the responsibility for their own learning?  And, by focusing so narrowly on teachers, are we saying that students, parents, and the society at large have no real say in the matter? I am not contending that there are any real right or wrong answers to these questions. But shouldn’t we at least be asking them?

In the end, Quintero’s article points to a need for a broader perspective, one that must combine the student and teacher (the school), the family, the community/culture, and the government towards what I have termed a culture of education. Many others, such as DiCarlo’s A Big Fish in a Small Pond, have made similar sentiments. Without building this long-term culture of education, learning and achievement will never be not optimized.

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times highlighted the woeful state of children’s health and fitness: about 1 in 3 California students passed the physical fitness test in 2010.

Specifically, 28.7% of students in grade five, 34.6% in grade seven, and 38.5% in grade nine were rated as “fit,” or to use accountability parlance, “proficient.” Given the fact that obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years and that only 25% of boys and 15% of girls were found to have adequate exercise, according to Reuters, this is certainly no surprise. The American Heart Association recommends children get at least 60 minutes of moderate physical activity every day.

So where are the accountability hawks on this issue? If children are not deemed fit, should the physical education teachers be blamed, just as teachers are now liable for students’ academic progress? How about the school?

Let’s take this parallel further. If all schools had standardized physical fitness tests every year starting in 3rd grade, how much is the PE teacher responsible? If children consistently failed, would paying teachers more based on physical fitness performances be any more effective? If the school neglected to reach adequate yearly progress, would we send children to other private schools and shut down failing schools?

Sounds like a bit much, considering children spend considerably more time outside of school eating and doing physical activities. I imagine most conservatives would revert back to their mantra of exercising personality responsibility — we should be able to eat what we want and use restraint (and keep the government out!). If you get fat, it is your problem, and no one else’s. That’s certainly how some New Yorkers felt when Mayor Bloomberg made unilateral decisions to cut down salt and trans fat from the city’s restaurants and markets (not to mention indoor smoking).

So why is this same theme of personal responsibility not applied to academic learning? All of the sudden, it is not the child and the parents’ responsibility to do well in school, but the teachers’? This is the thinking behind merit pay, value-added data, and other performance-based evaluative measures for teachers.

You can’t have it both ways.

I leave you with the inspiration for this post, The Conservative Hypocrisy.

All this talk in education about poverty being the major reason for poor academic achievement and performance got me thinking: Is it really just poverty?

No doubt it plays an important role. Researchers Hart & Risley’s well-cited longitudinal study in the early 1990s found that children in welfare families were exposed to substantially less language at home than in professional families: A difference of 300 words spoken per hour, which extrapolated over a year would result in 11 million words versus 3 million. Language experience tightly linked to large differences in child outcome. Not only do those in poverty tend to have less books in the home and less rich language spoken, but their home life is generally less stable:

Almost one in five children in poor or low-income families had moved in the last year, which means disrupted schooling and stress. In 2007, 1.7 million kids had a parent in prison, including one in fifteen black children. In 2008, around 460,000 children spent time in foster care. In 2009, 2.2 million were being raised by grandparents or other relatives…Poor kids are more likely to be raised by single mothers and to have parents who didn’t finish high school or go to college. Even just living with other poor people seems to harm kids. Those who live in disadvantaged neighborhoods have lower reading scores; so do low-income kids who go to schools where the student body is 75 percent or more minority. Most black and Latino kids attend such schools. By the age of 2, poorer children have fallen cognitively behind those from wealthier families. (See full article, It Takes a Village, Not a Tiger)

Noted education historian Diane Ravitch believes poverty is the culprit. The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss wrote about it. The results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) spawned discussions that pointed to it as the culprit for our low rankings. Executive Director of the National Association of Secondary School Principal (NASSP) Dr. Gerald Tirozzi found that our low scores could be explained by our relatively high poverty rate of 20%. No other developed country has one out of every five children living in poverty. Had we used comparable data, U.S. would actually come in first internationally. I even wrote about the its significance in my post, Can Schools Overcome Poverty?

With all this support, poverty appears to be the only culprit. So why have I started to feel uneasy with this conclusion?

Maybe because The Educated Society is about looking at the bigger picture, leading me to puzzle over why apologists exclude Asians in poverty discussions. After all, first and second generation Asian immigrants have historically toiled in urban Chinatown ghettos, yet academically “overachieved.” Along with whites, they have generally performed at the top of all academic measures. Only more recently have these neighborhoods started to gentrify.

On the other hand, The New York Times recently reported that the proficiency of black students was even bleaker than expected. Distilled scores from NAEP, considered the respected national standard, revealed that only 12% of black fourth grade boys were proficient in reading along with 12% of black eighth grade boys in math — compared to 38% and 44% for whites respectively. State scores in New York and Los Angeles made similar reports.

Apparently poverty can’t fully explain this, since “poor white boys do just as well as African-American boys who do not live in poverty, measured by whether they qualify for subsidized school lunches,” according to the article. California’s 2007 report stated that almost half of impoverished Asians were at or above grade level in English Language Arts, compared with a quarter of Hispanics. Its results spurred state superintendent Jack O’Connell to tackle the uncomfortable topic about pernicious cultural factors at work among minorities.

O’Connell is not alone. Respected researcher and economist Dr. Ronald Ferguson, who is black, used quantitative data to convey this culture gap. Part of it, he asserts,

…is that black parents on average are not as academically oriented in raising their children as whites. In a wealthy suburb he surveyed, 40 percent of blacks owned 100 or more books, compared with 80 percent of whites. In first grade, the percentage of black and white parents reading to their children daily was about the same; by fifth grade, 60 percent to 70 percent of whites still read daily to their children, compared with 30 percent to 40 percent of blacks. (See full article).

Though he also ascribes economics and teacher bias to the blacks’ lower academic performances, Dr. Ferguson is clearly not mincing words — it is not just poverty, but a cultural deficit. This conclusion echoed similar and controversial reports by then-sociologists James Coleman and Patrick Moynihan in the 1960s regarding student background and family, respectively.

In talking with my Asian education colleagues in New York City, I found they held similar views.”Poverty may explain part of it, but Asian immigrants are poor AND they have a language barrier, so how do you explain the disproportionate results?” one asked. Everything I knew about poverty just did not add up when Asians came into the picture. (For that matter, immigrants from the West Indies — another minority group who have generally outperformed Blacks and Hispanics — also defied this explanation.)

I have readily believed poverty was the sole reason for the lack of achievement, yet I couldn’t explain why many Asians have overcome this (or perhaps I did not want to confront it). Having taught in Title 1 schools (by definition, poor) in New York’s Chinatown, I knew that in most cases both parents worked long hours — usually in restaurants or clothing factories, leaving grandparents to look after children. Yet they overachieved (I read that one parent retorted, it’s not that we overachieve, it’s that Americans underachieve). Almost all Asian parents showed up to parent teacher conferences and consistently asked me to give their children more work and support. If parents could not show up, their grandparents would, with kids in tow to translate. That helps build and sustain a culture prioritizing education.

After school programs also made up a big part of that culture, a tradition imported from the Far East. These supplemental programs, known as buxiban in Chinese, juku in Japanese, and hagwon in Korea, flourish in Chinatown all year round — after school, weekends, and summer. Some were locally funded and some were private, and all of them thrived. I know, because I’ve taught in two of them as well. Though some included physical activities and Chinese language instruction, academics was the priority. Not sports. Not arts.

I think former teacher Martha Sadler presented her view best in an article for The Santa Barbara Independent in 2007. Having worked in the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD), she could not make sense of the Hispanic students’ low academic ratings despite strong teacher support:

Puzzling over this during one of my school breaks at LAUSD, I decided to go visit Castelar Street Elementary, a school in a Chinese neighborhood that continually received high test marks even though most of the students were English language learners from low-income families. The teachers were very good, but not better than those I had watched at my school, and their room decor was not nearly as attractive and print-rich.

I watched five different classes, and then followed a mass of kids to the neighborhood library, where they studied in an upstairs workroom. The scene was not much different from any other homework hall, though there were parents and grandparents watching the kids. They couldn’t really help with the actual assignments, but watched patiently as the children worked, talked, and afterward ran around the library, annoying the other library patrons until closing time.

Perplexed as to how this made for high test scores, I walked outside and found myself nose to nose with a Chinese school, located almost next door, where many of these same students spent several hours on the weekend studying in Mandarin or Cantonese. Education was everywhere in this little slice of Chinese culture. As I asked random parents why they thought their school did better than others, it was also pointed out that Castelar offers tutoring on the weekends.

Santa Barbara has a Chinese school, too, begun in 1994 by UCSB Chinese lecturer Jennifer Hsu. On Sundays, about 80 children study Mandarin reading and writing for two hours, interspersed by an hour of arts like calligraphy and folk dancing. The teachers are mostly parents, and the administrators are all volunteers.

Hsu explained to me that Asian cultures have been studious for thousands of years. It goes all the way back to Confucius in China, who was part of a flowering of philosophical schools circa 500 BCE, around the time the Chinese started using chopsticks and developed their writing system. Confucius was not only a scholar, but a teacher of literature, history, art, music, sports. While many of the parents at the Santa Barbara Chinese School are successful engineers and professors from Taiwan, Confucius’ emphasis on education wasn’t just for the elite – it spread throughout the classes and the region, elevating the importance of a good education across China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and beyond. That explains a lot.

One Santa Barbara Chinese School parent – whose children are staggeringly accomplished in sports, music, and scholastics – emphasized the role of poverty as a major factor in low achievement. Although the mother has a degree, she stays at home in order to raise her children. How, she asks, can people do that if they are working all the time?

“If my kids had a choice,” she said, explaining that she makes her children schedule playtime in with their more studious activities, “they would rather go play outside with their friends than play piana Any child would, but they have to discipline themselves. How can their family teach them this self-discipline if they are away from home working so much? The children go out to the streets to find a family feeling, and with a bunch of kids hanging out together with no adult supervision, guess what’s going to happen?”

Working-class struggles aside, the mother also pondered the cultural quandary, saying, “I don’t know how much the [Hispanic] cultures treasure education.”

The school condition, its resources, or even teachers were secondary. The Asian emphasis on education took precedence over the parent’s job, as in the aforementioned mother’s case. I drew parallel experiences teaching in New York’s Chinatown. Here parents sacrificed their limited paychecks to pay a substantial amount for top after school programs. Those who could not joined non-profit cultural organizations with after school services, like Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC) or Immigrant Social Services (ISS). The cultural emphasis on education completely overrides any other priority in the child AND the parents’ life.

My conclusion? Yes, poverty does matter, but culture matters more. This may not sound new, but in light of the current education debate pointing to poverty as the ultimate culprit of anemic achievement, it is in fact very significant. Thus, the surest way to address the achievement gap is not to focus on what impedes students (the negative), but what helps them (the positive). Given this framework, poverty is not the answer. Building a positive culture of education matters tremendously more, as Asians have found. It overcomes the language barrier, and it overcomes poverty. But they have had thousands of years to build it. How can we begin?

Start with my five-part series on Creating a Culture of Education.