This position paper is circulated in the hope that it will draw broad

reaction and criticism.

Thank you. mbrady22@cfl.rr.com

Education Reform: A problem, and a proposal

In this paper, I will argue that the education reform being

promoted by the federal government will fail, that the major
underlying cause of poor school performance is being incorrectly
diagnosed, and that the rationale for the reform strategy is
unsupportable. I will identify specific problems with a critically
important but generally ignored component of traditional general
education instruction, and propose an alternative.

How matters stand

The "standards and accountability" education reform effort begun

in the 1980s at the urging of leaders of business and industry, is
failing. The reform message, powerfully reinforced by mainstream
media, is simple: One: America's schools are, at best, mediocre.
Two: Teachers and students deserve most of the blame. Three:
As a corrective, rigorous subject-matter standards and tests must
be put in place. Four: Market forces must be brought to bear to
pressure teachers and students to work to those standards.

It is assumed that competition - student against student, teacher

against teacher, school against school, state against state, nation
against nation - will yield the improvement necessary for the
United States to finish in first place internationally.

Premises of the current reform strategy

This diagnosis of the cause of poor school performance and

prescription for its cure structure a reform strategy that seems
straightforward and logical but rests on an unexamined
assumption.
That strategy: Education reform policy must be "data driven."
Standardized tests produce the necessary data in the form of
scores. The scores are valid because the tests are valid. The
tests are valid because they are keyed to standards. The
standards are valid because they are keyed to certain school
subjects. These subjects are valid because they are components
of the core curriculum. The core curriculum is valid because it has
been in use for more than a century and its validity has not been
challenged.

Or, to sequence the logic differently: Custom and bureaucracy

legitimize the core curriculum, the core curriculum legitimizes
certain school subjects, those subjects legitimize the standards,
the standards legitimize the tests, the tests legitimize the scores,
and the scores legitimize the reform strategy.

Imagine an inverted pyramid, with the whole of the current

reform effort resting on the assumption that the present math-
science-language arts-social studies "core curriculum" adequately
prepares the young for what will almost certainly be the most
complex, unpredictable, demanding and dangerous era in human
history.

The major underlying cause of poor school performance

The "core" was adopted in 1893. Custom and the conventional

wisdom notwithstanding, it is deeply flawed. It (1) directs
random information at learners at rates far beyond even the most
capable learner's ability to cope, (2) minimizes or even rejects
the role that free play, art, music, dance, and random social
experience play in intellectual development, (3) is so inefficient it
leaves little time for apprenticeships, internships, co-ops,
projects, and other links to the real world and adulthood, (4)
neglects extremely important fields of study, (5) has no built-in
mechanisms forcing it to adapt to social change, (6) gives short
shrift to "higher order" thought processes, and (7) makes no
provision for raising and examining questions essential to ethical
and moral development.

The core (8) has no agreed-upon, overarching societal aim, (9)

lacks criteria establishing what new knowledge is important and
what old knowledge to disregard to make way for the new, (10)
does not move learners steadily through ever-increasing levels of
intellectual complexity, (11) overworks learner memory at the
expense of logic, (12) emphasizes reading and symbol
manipulation skills to the neglect of other ways of learning, (13)
is keyed to students' ages rather than their aptitudes, interests,
and abilities, (14) makes educator dialog and teamwork difficult
because it artificially and arbitrarily fragments knowledge, and
(15) encourages attempts to quantify quality and other simplistic
approaches to evaluation.

As it is usually taught, the core (16) penalizes rather than

capitalizes on individual differences, (17) ignores the systemically
integrated nature of knowledge, (18) fails to adequately utilize
the single most valuable teaching resource - learner first-hand
experience, (19) requires a great deal of "seat time passivity" at
odds with youthful nature, (20) is inordinately costly to
administer, (21) emphasizes standardization to the neglect of the
major sources of America's past strength and success - individual
initiative, imagination, and creativity - and (22) fails to recognize
the implications of the recent transition from difficult learner
access to limited information, to near-instantaneous learner
access to prodigious volumes of information.

If, as the No Child Left Behind legislation, Race to the Top, and
The Common Core State Standards Initiative assume, the
curriculum is sound, the most important reform questions have to
do with the effectiveness of competition and other market forces
in altering teacher and learner behavior.

But if poor performance is not primarily a "people problem" but a

system problem - a poor curriculum - these programs are at best
ineffectual and at worst counterproductive, for they maintain and
reinforce the curricular status quo.
The need

The role the general education curriculum plays in shaping

individuals and the future of the nation is too important to simply
take its validity for granted. Any one of the 22 problems noted
earlier is sufficiently serious to warrant emergency action, the
traditional curriculum suffers from all of them, and more than a
century of efforts to improve it by sequencing and re-sequencing
courses, altering distribution requirements, and exploring
interdisciplinary parallels and intersections, have not solved the
core curriculum's problems.

Failure to recognize those problems has contributed to the

arrogance that leads elites and policymakers to assume they
know enough about human potential, the nature of the future,
and the range of differences in learners and learner situation to
dictate what the young need to know, a notion at odds with
common sense and deep-seated societal values.

It is almost universally assumed that the academic disciplines are

the optimum organizers of knowledge. The disciplines are indeed
important and productive, but neither singly nor in any
combination do they provide what learners most need for general
education purposes - a "master" organizer of information
encompassing and relating all knowledge, free of the problems
noted above, and easily understood and manipulated by all
learners.

That organizer must be constructed and lifted into consciousness

by the individual learner. Only if reality is engaged directly is that
possible.

A proposal

Educating, finally, is about helping the young construct

satisfactory mental models of reality to guide action. It is ironic,
then, that given reality's ubiquity, three-dimensionality, and
ready accessibility, so much formal instruction ignores it,
concentrating instead on learner familiarity with secondhand
information regarding it. This manifestation of the process of
"institutionalization" - making the study of text and other
facsimiles and models of reality play a more important role in
instruction than reality itself - must be countered.

Immediate, "right here, right now" reality or its "residue" should

be the learner's primary "textbook," and making it so is the
surest, most direct route to a philosophically defensible,
theoretically sound, politically neutral, practical, useful, problem-
free curriculum.

A curriculum focused on making more sense of immediate reality

(the learner's school, certainly, and perhaps neighborhood),
provides an initial real-world focus of study unsurpassed in
relevance and practicality. It automatically adapts to every
ability level, challenging the least and most able learners alike. It
can provide direct, "hands on" exposure to every major concept
of every major discipline. It engages learners in a task they will
face every moment for the rest of their lives. It utilizes every
known cognitive process, erases the artificial, arbitrary lines
between specialized studies and between the sciences and the
humanities, makes obvious the systemic nature of reality,
enriches the disciplines, and stimulates creativity. Its efficiency
has the potential to revolutionize scheduling, radically expand
learning options and make possible truly significant cuts in
budgets. In short, it addresses all 22 of the curricular problems
noted above.

The challenge of change

There will be no significant improvement in general education

until the inadequacies of the traditional curriculum are admitted
and addressed. Resistance will be formidable, for the curricular
status quo is deeply embedded in tradition at all levels of
instruction from elementary school through the university.
Complex bureaucracies buttress it, corporations are deeply
invested in it, and nearly all educators have reason to resist it.
Additionally, many in positions of authority are psychologically
disposed to reject granting learners sufficient autonomy to
construct their own models of reality.

But if we hope to survive, clinging to a curriculum that was poor

when it was adopted and grows more dysfunctional by the day, is
not an option.

The situation calls for leadership, for no task is inherently more

intellectually demanding than deciding what the young should be
taught. Unfortunately, presently, those decisions are being
informed by leaders of business and industry and others whose
perspectives are too narrow to reflect the common good, and
embodied in legislation by policymakers who lack an
understanding of the issues and an ability to grasp their systemic
implications and ramifications.

A high-profile national dialog should be initiated. Given the

present level of political polarization, it should be sponsored by
politically neutral parties.

Marion Brady 5/14/10

Mbrady22@cfl.rr.com www.MarionBrady.com