A Diversity of Education

Pluralism … allows individual schools, educators, and providers to excel at something, rather than asking every school to excel at everything.

–Hess (2010): Doing the Same Thing Over and Over in AEI Outlook Series.

Frederic Hess’ new book advocates a diversity in educational formats. Steven Teles has a detailed review.

The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas by Frederic Hess.

Hess shares the same basic premise of most progressive, constructivist, educational approaches like Montessori’s, that students learn differently so they need different educational approaches. However, he takes this need for diverse educational environments further with the recognition that teachers are different so they will have their own educational philosophies and methods that work best for them, and that parents are different, with very different expectations about what education should be and what it should accomplish.

… the basic components of schooling—parents, children, school leaders, and teachers—are irreducibly diverse. Parents have different ideas about what a “well-educated” child is, and children differ quite significantly in temperament, aptitude, habits, and interests. School leaders vary as to how they think schools should be run, while teachers have different skill levels, enthusiasm for different tasks, and ideas about what children should learn and know.

… Educators will always be less effective if they are made to teach in a way that they believe is wrongheaded or that they haven’t bought into. Students will have difficulty learning if they are forced to work at a pace that is too fast or too slow, or if they are taught in a manner that doesn’t match their individual learning styles. Parents can be disengaged or hostile if the pedagogy, discipline, or school culture differ fundamentally from what they think is right for their child. And schools as a whole will be incoherent and disorganized if they cannot count on some baseline of agreement as to what—and who—the school is for.

— Teles (2011): One Size Doesn’t Fit All in Washington Monthly.

Although Hess works for the conservative American Enterprise Institute his own thought on education are far from traditional:

[T]here is value in nurturing diverse intellectual traditions, models of thought, bodies of knowledge, and modes of learning. It is prudent to embrace a system of schooling that nurtures a diverse set of skills, knowledge, and habits of mind. This allows us to foster intellectual diversity that enriches civil society and … [i]t allows individual schools, educators, and providers to excel at something, rather than asking every school to excel at everything.

–Hess (2010): Doing the Same Thing Over and Over in AEI Outlook Series.

Furthermore, Hess argues, the world has changed since the inception of universal education, but the educational system has not adapted to the changing needs and technology. He points out new innovations allowed by technology, like the School of One program in New York.

All of this is hard to argue with. It’s almost the standard constructivist critique of the current educational system, although constructivists tend to focus on how we’ve not applied all the stuff we’ve learned about pedagogy since the 19th century (Lillard, 2005 lays out this argument eloquently in Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius).

Hopefully, this book broadens and advances the arguments for reforming the educational system. It is a progressive view from a conservative organization. Yet it still begs the question of how do we get there from here, while dealing the serious concerns that greater diversity may well lead to some failures as well as successes. Ultimately, we end up with the same fairly intractable problem. However, how do you measure success where there is such a diversity of expectations for education?

The Montessori Method and Free Markets

If economics ultimately boils down to the study of human behavior, and our students are ultimately human (stick with me for a second here), then economic theory ought to be able to inform the way we teach. In fact, I’d argue that constructivist approaches to education, like Montessori, work for the same reasons that free-markets outperform highly-centralized command economies: freedom (within limits) better maximizes human welfare. I think this applies both to students in aggregate (the entire student population), and to the individual student also, though you probably have to aggregate over time.

What do I mean by Economics

As a study of human behavior economics differs from psychology, sociology and the other social sciences primarily because it uses money as a metric. This gives it a lot more data to play with. The last century has clearly demonstrated the advantages of the “invisible hand” of the free-market over highly-centralized command economies in providing for the broader public good. So what lessons from the study of economics can we apply to education?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we should be treating our schools and classrooms as businesses. We’re not trying to maximize profits for a firm (via test scores or however else that might translate to education), we’re trying to maximize the welfare of our students, which I take to mean, helping them achieve their full potential.

Command-and-Control

As we’ve seen in our studies of economics, flexible, market-based approaches are much better (more efficient) at achieving goals that the command-and-control, dictatorial model. The evolution of EPA’s approach to regulating pollution is an excellent example of how a federal agency learned to employ the experience of economics to better achieve a public good.

cuyahoga_fire650 — The Cayahoga River on fire in 1952. Image from United Press International via NOAA.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, rivers catching on fire, smog, and books on the invisible consequences of pollution, like Silent Spring, inspired the environmental movement and spurred the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The EPA’s job was, and is, to enforce the laws that reduce pollution and protect environment. In the beginning, they did this by telling industry and companies what to do: the EPA mandated strict limits on the emissions from factories; and power plants were required to install the “best available technology” to reduce pollution. These approaches sound good, and are certainly necessary for pollutants that are dangerous to places close to where they are emitted, but they can be expensive, encouraging people to look for loopholes in the rules so they also become expensive to enforce.

You get the same problems with long, detailed lists of rules in the classroom. Students try to circumvent the letter of the law, rather than adhere to the spirit of the rules. “No iPods allowed,” is forced to evolve into “No Personal Electronic Devices.” Then come the questions, “What about watches?” and, “What about iPads?” so more rules need to be added to the list. By the end of the week you’re approaching a list of rules approaching the length of the tax code, and still adding more.

In the case of environmental regulation, to deal with this type of problem, the field of environmental economics emerged. Environmental economists try to figure out how to achieve the pollution reducing outcomes that everyone wants in the most economically efficient way possible. More efficiency means lower costs to society. They found that there are usually quite a number of ways to achieve the environmental objectives, using the principles of the free market, that are much more efficient than the command-and-control approach the EPA had been using.

Economists like to use mathematics. There are lots of supply and demand curves, and lots of derivatives, which tend to force some over-simplification (in much the same way that your textbook supply and demand curves are almost invariably straight lines). However, sometimes simple models can lead to a better understanding of how people in societies work.

Cap and Trade

Acid_rain_woods1 — Trees believed to have been killed by acid rain. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In the 1980’s coal burning factories and power plants were churning out a lot of pollutants. One of these, sulphur dioxide (SO₂) would react with rainwater and to create sulphuric acid, which would fall as acid rain. Acid rain was a huge problem because lots of plants and animals living in lakes, streams and forests were finding it hard to adapt to the increasing acidity of their environment. Furthermore, more acidic rainwater was damaging the paint on people’s cars and dissolving limestone statues and buildings.

So the EPA implemented a Cap and Trade program. They had a good idea of how much SO₂ was being released into the atmosphere, and they know how much they wanted to reduce it by, so they started to issue companies permits to pollute.

The trick was that EPA would only give out permits equal to the total amount of SO₂ emissions they wanted, and every year they would reduce the amount of permits until they reduced the pollution enough to resolve the acid rain problem.

Now all the companies that polluted SO₂ had to either buy a permit or stop polluting. If they could easily reduce their pollution, a company might have extra permits that they could sell to a company that was having a harder time. In theory, some companies could even buy up permits from other companies and increase their pollution. But since the EPA was only giving out so many permits, whatever happened the total SO₂ pollution was still going down.

Doing it this way let the EPA set the goals and let the market for pollution permits allocate how the actual pollution reduction got done. Since the permits could be sold, this encouraged the companies that could easiest reduce their pollution to do so, resulting in a reduction in pollution at the lowest cost.

It also meant that companies were now starting to pay for the environmental damage they were doing. Acid rain is a regional problem so it’s hard to say that your pollution from your factory in Ohio is specifically causing the acid rain here in my forest in Vermont. The atmosphere was being treated as a common dumping ground.

Cap and trade is not without its problems, however, at least in this case, it worked extremely well.

The Innate Desire to do the Dishes

Montessori believed that children have an innate desire to learn. We’ve seen how easily praise and rewards can damage that internal drive. I have, however, found it hard to identify my student’s innate desire to do the dishes. They may want a clean environment, they may have been trained since pre-kindergarten to clean up after themselves (restore their environment), but their is quite often a reluctance to doing it themselves.

The relationship to the pollution issue is startling to think about at first, but really the issues are the same. After struggling for quite a while to get everyone to do their classroom jobs, recognition of the parallel between my job and the EPA’s lead me to thinking about creating the Job Market Trading Board. Students can trade jobs and when they do it, but in the end, the jobs get done. I remain impressed at how well it has worked.

The basic principle is more general though: set the goals and let the students figure out the best way to accomplish them.

The Myth of Adolescent Angst

Fortunately, we also know from extensive research both in the U.S. and elsewhere that when we treat teens like adults, they almost immediately rise to the challenge.
— Epstein (2007): The Myth of the Teen Brain in Scientific American Mind.

Is the angst and turmoil we usually associate with adolescence just a result of the way human brains develop, or is it something learned, and depends on the society that shapes our kids? Robert Epstein argues (Epstein, 2007) it’s the latter not the former, and, despite a lot of other research to the contrary, he may have a point. He believes the main problem is that western teens are treated more as children than young-adults, and they spend most of their time socializing with other teens and not with adults.

Cerebral Lobes — Cerebral lobes (image via Wikimeida Commons).

Alex Chediak posts a good overview of the work.

We’ve seen that one of the major problems with most psychological studies is that they only focus on WEIRD people, typically represented by college students in the Western world, who are the easiest people for university researchers to study. Using any such subset must, necessarily, be unrepresentative of the full range of human behavior. Furthermore, since society influences brain development, even studies that focus less on behavior and more on neurological imaging are likely to be affected by the some bias.

A similar argument can be made for studies of adolescence since most studies of adolescence focus on western teens. As a result, separating behavior learned via social interaction, from the regularly progression of genetically programmed brain development is going to be difficult.

Much of Epstein’s argument is based on the book Adolescence: An Anthropological Inquiry (Schlegel and Barry, 1991), which compared teens in almost 200 pre-industrial societies. Epstein summarizes this and other work to indicate that in pre-industrial cultures:

about 60 percent had no word for “adolescence,”

teens spent almost all their time with adults,

teens showed almost no signs of psychopathology

antisocial behavior in young males was completely absent in more than half these cultures and extremely mild in cultures in which it did occur.

teen trouble begins to appear in other cultures soon after the intro- duction of certain Western influences, especially Western-style schooling, television programs and movies.

— Epstein (2007) (my bulleting): The Myth of the Teen Brain in Scientific American Mind.

As a result, teens:

learn virtually everything they know from one another rather than from the people they are about to become. Isolated from adults and wrongly treated like children, it is no wonder that some teens behave, by adult standards, recklessly or irresponsibly.

Apprenticeship (image by Emile Adan via Wikimedia Commons).

Epstein’s antidote is to treat teens like adults. I agree. However, it’s essential to keep in mind what type of adults we want them to be: responsible and logical, while retaining the creativity we usually associate with childhood. This is something that typifies the ideal of Montessori education, all the way from early-childhood up.

Negative Feedback is Important

For success to occur, many things must go right: The person must be skilled, apply effort, and perhaps be a bit lucky. For failure to occur, the lack of any one of these components is sufficient. Because of this, even if people receive feedback that points to a lack of skill, they may attribute it to some other factor.
– Kruger and Dunning (1999): Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)

If we’re not skilled at something then only practice and learning can remedy the situation. But, according to Kruger and Dunning (1999), human nature tends to try to blame other things, like luck, instead of our own lack of skill when things go wrong. Interestingly, we’re even resistant to thinking that our lack of skill is the problem, even when we’re given that negative feedback.

So an essential skill for the student is to learn how to take criticism constructively. Self-awareness, metacognition, and the ability to be honest with oneself are important. Let this be a warning:

“One of the ways people gain insight into their own competence is by comparing themselves with others.” “Incompetent individuals fail to gain insight into their own incompetence by observing the behavior of other people.”
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)

P.S. Note that “incompetent” is used here to express a level of knowledge and skill that can be improved on to become “competent”. Incompetence is not a fixed quality, unless you let it be.

P.P.S. This is another reason why it’s important that students share their work with one another and the class. The best work tends to ratchet up the standards and expectations.

The scientific explanation of why adolescents know everything!

The central proposition in our argument is that incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive skills that enable them to tell how poorly they are performing, and as a result, they come to hold inflated views of their performance and ability…. the way to make incompetent individuals realize their own incompetence is to make them competent.
– Kruger and Dunning (1999): Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)

If you don’t know what you’re doing, then it’s quite likely that you don’t know that you don’t know. Kruger and Dunning (1999) did a set of interesting studies to show this to be the case. It explains why people with the least information and knowledge about a subject may feel the most confident to opine about it.

It kind of explains why adolescents know everything. I know that I knew everything when I was 12, and ever since then I’ve been knowing less and less.

Of course there are the less typical teenagers who don’t express the same unaware overconfidence. They can be extremely competent at a particular thing (let’s call it a domain), like writing to take a purely random example, yet are extremely unconfident of their ability.

Well Kruger and Dunning (1999) have an explanation for that too. Competent people tend to think everyone else is competent too, so they tend too underestimate their ability relative to everyone else.

Teachers can easily fall into a similar trap, because we will often, quite unintentionally and unconsciously, assume students know more than they do. This is one of the reasons peer-teaching works so well. Students are more likely to know where their peers are coming from, and what they know to begin with.

The NY Times’ Errol Morris has a great interview with one of this study’s authors.

I’ll end with the most wonderful concluding remarks, which really put this whole study in perspective:

In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, method- ological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)

Taking ownership

Progressive approaches to education focus on students taking ownership of their education. It works in education, it works in economics, and it works in politics too.

Protesters are also working with students and the army to protect the priceless antiquities at the Egyptian Museum and the books at Bibliotecha Alexindrina.

Notes on Daniel Pink’s Drive

Introduction

Introduces the idea of intrinsic motivation.

Describes Harlow and Deci‘s original studies that came up with the idea of intrinsic motivation. Note: Maslow (of Hierarchy of Needs fame) was Harlow’s student.
Three basic types of motivation (drives):
- Motivation 1.0: Biological (need for food, drink, sex)
- Motivation 2.0: Extrinsic (e.g. getting paid)
- Motivation 3.0: Intrinsic

Chapter 1: Extrinsic versus Intrinsic Motivation

1. Wikipedia: a success almost entirely because contributors are willing to invest their time and energy for no reward; the very definition of intrinsic motivation.

Note: Despite my own challenges with students using Wikipedia as a reliable source, we use our own classroom Wiki extensively. Giving students projects with a clear goal in mind, but great freedom in execution (like the choose your own adventure stories), seems to tap into the same spirit that motivates the Wikipedia contributors.

2. Social operating systems: the basic, often invisible, assumption on which society runs.

Note: Good metaphor, but he explains it as if the development of our understanding of motivation paralleled human evolution/development. Pre-social humans were driven primarily by the biological imperative, like large animals still are, he claims. I am very uneasy about this sort of lazy extrapolation given how much we’re learning that differences between humans and animals are no where near where we thought they’d be, particularly given the social organization of many animals. He also ignores cross-cultural differences: different societies value self-actualization and other intrinsic motivation characteristics much differently than the WIERD one he seems to be describing.

3. Introduces behavioral economics (mentions Ariely): Humans are not anywhere near to being ideal, rational economic agents.

4. During the industrial revolution, work was mostly algorithmic (a worker could follow a clearly defined set of steps to get their job done), while now it’s mostly heuristic (workers have to come up with new things).

algorithmic work is being replaced by software and outsourced really fast (that’s globalization for you)
p. 30 – U.S. job growth – 30% algorithmic, 70% heuristic.
Note: Pink claims that heuristic work can’t be outsourced “generally”. He apparently wrote a book about it: A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. I may have to get that one, because, while I can see automation eliminating most algorithmic work, I don’t know why heuristic work is so difficult to outsource. Certainly there are local, cultural issues that would make things like advertising campaigns difficult for outsiders (and teaching would probably be hard to outsource too because most people don’t want to send their kids overseas for school), but a lot of other stuff is not that difficult for some creative person somewhere else to do; the world is, after all, Flat. Heuristic jobs are still going to be more abundant than algorithmic, but going heuristic no magic bullet: global competition is still going to be a major factor in the future.

Chapter 2

Baseline rewards: the basics people need in a job that earns them a living. Salary, a few perks, some benefits etc.

Below baseline rewards there is little motivation.
Above baseline rewards extrinsic rewards can be counterproductive.

Work vs. Play: Mark Twain: “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

When rewards don’t work:

When they are expected (see also post on Praise and Rewards) (called contingent rewards). If you do this, you’ll get this, does not work.

Deci et al., 1999: “tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation.”

(to be continued)

Cognitive diversity in the classroom

Since different student learn better in different ways, would it make sense to separate schools and classes by different learning styles? A countervailing argument, and the one upon which my Montessori middle school program (which is based on the Coe model) is predicated, is that students need to learn about different ways of learning and be able to interact with peers with different learning styles because creative endevours, especially in the future, will rely heavily on making connections between diverse fields and groups. The importance of having students interact in a diverse environment is particularly important if we can observe that students will, eventually, self-select in different fields based on their native talents, which are related to their learning styles. Students with a mathematical aptitude may tend to become engineers, more so than their peers.

So intellectual and cognitive diversity is important, yet the program also requires some uniformity. I’ve heard that, in general, students without experiences in Montessori-like environments can have a hard time adapting to the Montessori Middle School because we expect an awful lot of independence and time management that students are often not exposed to in traditional schools.

At any rate, accounting for learning-style diversity is essential, and sometimes I wonder if today, with so many more opportunities and temptations available for early specialization, if we’re not seeing further diversification in the cognitive continuum. What precisely is the point where students should begin to specialize. Matt Might model (pictured below) has specialization of education beginning at college, but it really starts earlier, at least in high school, but I wonder where the is the most appropriate initiation actually is. Historically, at least, kids were apprenticed at a very early age.