Kuranga

[kuranga]

Wrong ways of thinking about learning

A little over six months ago, I submitted to the New Zealand government my report and findings on the use of science and data in decisionmaking within the New Zealand education system. Included in my report was a discussion of a 2012 paper authored by Rachel Bolstad and Jane Gilbert and issued by the New Zealand Council for Education Research (NZCER) on “future-focused learning.” The Bolstad paper included a brief section titled “What we know about learning” that purported to identify 11 key principles that have emerged from a “vast body of research on learning.”

As I argued in my report, some (though not all) of the principles identified in the Bolstad paper regarding what we know about learning were difficult if not impossible to square with the existing scientific consensus regarding how learning and cognition takes place. In particular, I took issue with the claim that we “know” that learning must be a personalised experience, defined in part in the Bolstad paper as requiring that learners “feel in charge of their own learning.” I found the misstatements of the actual evidence and research on learning in the Bolstad paper so egregious that I called upon New Zealand’s new Chief Education Science Advisor to elevate the discourse within the New Zealand education community around what we actually know about learning.

Yesterday, a New Zealand friend pointed me to a paper (”Different ways of thinking about learning”), authored by Rosemary Hipkins and again issued by NZCER, that responds to my Axford report. In response to my charge that the claims in the Bolstad paper “strayed beyond ‘cognition science’,” Hipkins concedes that “indeed they did--that was the point!”.  Perhaps more remarkably, the Hipkins paper challenges my “brain-based perspective” that frames learning as “only entailing cognitive activity.” In Hipkins’ view, “individual brain-based cognition is an inadequate frame of reference for how people learn in general, and therefore there will be a limitation on how useful evidence of this type can be for determining how best to support learning for different young people in different contexts.”

The Hipkins paper illustrates what I contend is a fundamental problem that plagues education systems today, whether in New Zealand, the US, or anywhere else as far as I know. Unless and until we reach consensus that (1) learning is primarily a cognitive function; (2) education-related decisions should aim primarily to improve cognitive function so as to facilitate better learning; and therefore (3) we should strive to use the best available evidence of how learning takes place when making education-related decisions -- we are all but doomed to an endlessly repeating cycle of edu-philosophical navel gazing. 

Indeed, we might ask ourselves why it is that other professions, such as the medical profession, have made such tremendous advances over the past century, across multiple dimensions, whereas education remains relatively stuck in the mud. Perhaps we might find a clue in this observation from medical historian Kenneth Ludmerer in his book Learning to Heal (p. 278):

For over a century, the goal of medical education [in the US] has been to produce thinking physicians, scientifically competent, who are sensitive to the emotional as well as the medical condition of the patient. Medical education of each successive generation have reaffirmed their belief in that ideal. The problem has not been in the validity of the ideal but the great difficulty of achieving it in practice.

Scientifically competent. To improve education outcomes, we must develop a similar ideal within the education profession that includes scientific competence as one of its central -- though certainly not only -- pillars. And we will only be able to develop that competence provided our education-research institutions themselves reduce the oversupply of values-laden essays that are untethered to empirical evidence. We must instead work together to develop a coherent set of principles that harmonize our best understanding of how we learn with practices that lead to that learning. And then we need to make sure teachers and other educators are exposed to these principles and learn how to apply them in the extraordinarily complex environments we call classrooms. 

Easier said than done? Well, watch this space.

[kuranga]

Science, values and privileges in policy - a great debate

During the course of my Axford fellowship, I had the honor of meeting with two of New Zealand’s most respected scientists: Sir Peter Gluckman, presently the chief science advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand; and Shaun Hendy, an eminent physicist and author at the University of Auckland. A very interesting intellectual debate is ongoing between the two of them on the nature and role of science in the policymaking process, and after interviewing both of them, I’d like to briefly offer my perspective on why there may be less distance between their respective positions than at first appears.

But first, what exactly is the debate? Gluckman and Hendy appear to have different views on the role of values in science and, importantly,the role of science in policy formation. Gluckman’s position is, firstly, that science should serve as a “privileged” input into policy. By “privileged” I take him to mean that, among the many issues that a policymaker must take into consideration before making a decision, scientific evidence and knowledge should be given special status. We might think of science playing the role of “trump card” in policy, although Gluckman is careful to always acknowledge that scientific advice should never be absolute or all-determining. Rather, science should be given extra weight in the policymaking process than other inputs.

Having thus argued for a privileged role for science in policy, Gluckman maintains that the sole source of the privilege comes from the relatively “values free” output of knowledge that results from scientific processes (e.g., empirical evidence, peer review, replication, falsification). Gluckman does not argue that all of science is values free, and in fact in numerous speeches he acknowledges -- albeit briefly -- that the choices scientists make in conducting research are inevitably the product of values-laden decisions. But his point as I understand it is that the robust processes of science essentially scrub away and minimize the influence of values on the knowledge that science produces. The role of a science advisor is to serve as an honest broker of this knowledge to policymakers, and avoid as much as possible the perception of being an advocate for anything other than what we think we know (or don’t know) as the result of scientific inquiry. Any other role threatens the values-free status of scientific knowledge and destroys any possibility that science should be privileged.

Wrong on both counts, says Shaun Hendy. In his view, the privilege of science derives not from stripping away of values but rather because the values of science are those that we find honorable -- values such as open dialogue, intellectual inquiry, and acceptable of human fallibility. Moreover, Hendy contends, these same values require a science advisor to engage with the communities affected by a policymaker’s decisions so as to ensure the decisions are well informed and consistent with these values. The science advisor cannot serve as a mere broker of knowledge: 

The responsibility of the science advisor extends well beyond the provision of evidence; the science advisor must also take responsibility for how the community uses the evidence. Again, the job of the science advisor is not just to deliver the facts, but to engage democratically to assist the community to weigh the full breadth of evidence. They must be prepared to listen to and learn from the community. They must understand the values of the communities they serve. The successful science advisor must be an advocate for scientific values and not simply a broker of fact.

This would appear to be a fairly major disagreement between two prominent New Zealand scientists. Yet I think they’re both right. How can this be?

The answer is that I think Gluckman is describing a fairly narrow and specific position -- that of a chief science advisor to a specific individual -- and Hendy is talking about the broader role that science should play in informing policy. I agree with Gluckman that, to the extent a science advisor hopes scientific evidence will be given special weight in the decisionmaking process, the chief science advisor cannot appear to be an advocate. In my view, the science advisor should serve as a sort of “policy ombudsman,” someone who informs and provides input into the policymaking process yet stands somewhat separate and apart from it. The chief science advisor thus serves as an honest broker to the policymaker they serve.

Yet, on a much broader scale, Hendy is surely correct that in order for scientific advice to be effective, brokering knowledge is not enough -- science and scientists must engage with the communities they serve, not only to ensure that science-informed policy decisions are faithfully implemented but also to develop empathy and understanding for the needs and (dare I say?) values of the affected communities. The question I pose is whether a science advisor should play this community engagement role or rather the scientific ethos should be instilled within the entirety of a policymaking apparatus. Put another way, I think that government officials, scientists, and members of the community should be working together to tackle issues that may be informed by scientific insight, but I would separate this function from that of a chief science advisor. What’s really needed is total systems transformation within public policy to simultaneously increase engagement with citizens while demanding greater levels of scientific rigor in policy formation and evaluation.

No easy task, that. But with Gluckman and Hendy both leading a very important international conversation around this, New Zealand may end up leading this transformation. I hope their debate continues and garners the attention it deserves!

[kuranga]

Ode to Aotearoa

Well, New Zealand, this is it. After eight months of adventure, intrigue and challenge, my departure is imminent. As I said in the acknowledgments to my fellowship report, while this experience did not turn out as expected, in many ways it exceeded what I hoped, and I suspect I will look back upon 2014 as one of the more transformative years of my life. To everyone I’ve met during my time here, thank you.

Over the past week, I’ve started to reflect on all the little moments and observations that accumulated throughout my travels here. And so, in no particular order and with only minimal editing for coherency, I now present my Ode to Aoetearoa in the form of a numbered list of incidents and experiences that brought me some small (or not-so-small) measure of happiness while I was here.

1. I love and will miss the casual generosity of Kiwis. I will never forget the moment at a dinner table in Te Anau when I learned that the semi-rough looking gentlemen sat to my left lived in Dunedin. My first words to him were “what’s fun to do in Dunedin?”, and his first words to me -- before learning my name, even -- were, “do you need a place to stay?”. This is just one of many moments when someone offered to help or house me without any justification other than wanting to be helpful. If there is anything about New Zealand that I hope has rubbed off on me, it’s this generous spirit.

2. You can’t help but notice the little linguistic differences that make cultures unique. For example, Kiwis say “heaps” incredibly often (in lieu of the much less charming “a lot of” or “many” that we’d use in the US). There are heaps of heaps, in other words. I’ve also got a pet theory that the Kiwi tendency to say “Sweet as!” or “Boring as!” reflects the ambiguity that I believe permeates throughout New Zealand culture. I kept wanting to ask, “sweet as...what? Boring as...what exactly?” Well, they’d just rather not say, thank you very much. It also took me awhile to realize that “it’s alright” -- note again the subtle ambiguity -- is the Kiwi equivalent of “you’re welcome!”, and that “ah, true?” means “oh, is that so?” rather than “you must be mad”.  

3. Speaking of linguistic differences, I think New Zealand should take pride in the commitment it’s made to preserving and celebrating te reo Maori, the indigenous language. There’s still a long way to go on this front, but I confess I’m at a loss to remember the last time I attended a conference in the US where the first speaker began their address in Navajo. I will return home far more respectful and frankly interested in supporting the preservation and celebration of Native American languages. My great-grandmother lived with the Hopi tribe, for example, and today there are less than 5,000 people who speak Hopi. I might try to add one more to that number.

4. I know I will miss how quiet it can be here. Bus rides in Wellington were almost always silent affairs, at least until someone got off at their stop and would declare, in oh-so-polite fashion, “thank you, driver!” Over and over this would happen, and I found it charming every time. And I think I heard a total of three sirens in the seven months I lived in New Zealand’s capital city -- in the US capital, you’ll hear that many in any random hour.

5. New Zealand is of course one of the most stunningly beautiful countries in the world. (That’s another Kiwi vocabulary addition, by the way -- “fantastic” sounds so mild compared to “stunning”.) What’s particularly wonderful is that you can enjoy this beauty almost entirely to yourself, should you so choose. Just three days ago, for example, a friend drove me 45 minutes out of Auckland to a black-sand beach where I fished from a rocky outcrop as the sun dropped over the horizon. Caught a stingray too, as you do.

6. Speaking of fishing, well, that could be an entire separate blog post. At times I’ve thought my experience fly fishing here is an apt metaphor for my overall experience, insofar as the trout here are plainly visible yet oh-so-elusive, always just beyond reach and punctuating the sensation that the challenge of catching one is more significant than actual success or failure. The key is patience, in more ways than one. My favorite rivers to fish? Why [REDACTED] and [CENSORED] and [YOU KNOW I CAN’T TELL YOU, RIGHT?].

7.  There are so many places that hold special significance to me. I think of Mossburn, the small South Island town I holed up in during my January fishing sojourn. Or Waihau Bay on the east coast of North Island, isolate and rural and Maori (watch the lovely little indie film Boy for proof of its magic). Indeed, if I returned to live in New Zealand, I’d give strong consideration to Gisborne, a lovely town with art deco architecture and a strong surf. For a more cultural-arts influenced lifestyle, I’d think about Oamarua and its quirky charm. All of these places and so many more will remain bright memories.

8. My favorite Central Otago pinot noir? Glad you asked. Dollar for dollar, you’d be hard pressed to find anything that beats Mudhouse. For craft beer, just about anything from Parrot Dog Brewery is worth drinking.

9. I also recommend Whittaker’s Berry & Biscuit chocolate bars. Trust me on this.

There are so many more things to add to this list, but with less than 24 hours to go before I depart, I need to stop and get ready for my foray into southeast Asia. The first iteration of this blog was named Shadow on the Clouds -- a phrase I stole from Elizabeth Catton -- and now, land of the long white cloud, I too become a shadow, just as you have shadowed me. Kia ora.

[kuranga]

My Axford report and the future of Kuranga

Earlier this week, my official report to the New Zealand government on the role of science and data in informing decision within the New Zealand education system was made public. If you’ve wondered why this blog has gone relatively quiet over the past six weeks, well, it’s largely because I was writing, editing, cite checking, and otherwise engaged in preparing the report.

Below, I’ve pasted the report’s executive summary to give readers a general sense of the themes and topics that are covered. Truth is, if you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve pretty much seen the report already. My suspicion is that the full report will be browsed on occasion by curious passersby to the Fulbright website, mostly those who are themselves interested in pursuing an Axford fellowship (that’s how I began my diligence, anyway).

This blog, however, is going to live on. I created Kuranga largely because I believe that most people don’t have time to read reports longer than five pages, and that social media and blogs are generally more effective means to communicate ideas. I also wanted to keep a real-time running journal of my experiences and observations so as to capture my ever-evolving interpretation of New Zealand’s school system and indeed, life in New Zealand itself. Although I haven’t written as frequently as I expected or wanted to, I know from firsthand reports that the subjects I’ve covered here have generated debate across the education community. That to me serves one of the very purposes of the Axford fellowship, to cross-fertilize ideas between New Zealand and the United States.

Well, I am now a genetically modified organism. There is no doubt that my experience in this country has transformed and illuminated my thinking and I want to preserve the conversation and the relationships I’ve developed with so many of the outstanding educators across these two tiny islands. I am deeply grateful for this. And I hope and expect this conversation to continue after I leave. 

Let it also be said that the public conversation that this blog hoped to nurture was challenging for all parties involved. While the majority of my observations of New Zealand schools were positive, and I celebrated those moments both on the blog and in my report, there were times when I felt compelled to speak honestly and candidly about things that concerned me. Ironically, and due to my growing awareness about Kiwi sensitivities (more on that momentarily), when things were really bad or provocative I shielded the schools and teachers behind the veil of anonymity. Yet for many, this was still too hot to handle, and I am well-aware that some who initially welcomed my arrival to New Zealand feel somewhat differently now.

People of New Zealand, you need to work on this. I know you don’t like hear Americans lecture you about things you should change, but the sensitivity you collectively possess about having warts exposed by outsiders suffocates free and frank public conversation and debate. At my goodbye dinner a few nights ago, a friend observed that hard conversations do occur here, but only behind locked doors. In some unique instances, that is as it should be, but the general posture of this country is, dare I say, almost anti-intellectual. I struggled deeply to adapt to the culture here because at times I felt deprived of the oxygen that keeps my brain respiring.

There were massive exceptions to this. Massive exceptions, and if you’re reading this, you probably are one of the many exceptions. Nothing pleased me more when I would receive an email or phone call from someone that began with, “I was thinking about what you wrote on your blog, and I disagree because…”. And while I’m deeply embarrassed that I’ve yet to figure out how to add comments to Kuranga, if there’s a silver lining, it’s that people were forced to contact me individually if they cared enough to continue the conversation privately. This led to all sorts of interesting insight. (That said, I’ll figure out how to get the damn comments up and running, I promise.)

With all official fellowship obligations complete, let me now speak free and frankly to my host agency, the New Zealand Ministry of Education. You viewed and I suspect continue to view this blog, and perhaps me individually, as a massive risk. That you could not control what I would say, or even what I was looking into, absolutely terrified you. This is a major problem. And I think you should collectively spend some time thinking about what needs to change.

Let me describe the problem as I see it in acute detail. The first school I visited in New Zealand was Wellington Girls College, which is an outstanding school with an extraordinary principal, Julia Davidson. I wrote a glowing report that Julia received warmly and shared with her senior staff. Yet here is the reaction that one deputy secretary at the Ministry of Education offered to me the day after that post came out: “Your blog Ben, I just don’t know.” Although this official hinted but stopped short of telling me to stop blogging, I strongly suspect the content of my blog was irrelevant. It was the lack of control that deeply concerned the powers-that-be. 

Here is the thing about perception: Eventually it becomes reality. The education philosopher Paulo Friere describes this as the “pedagogy of the oppressed” wherein the oppressed internalize the assumptions and stereotypes perpetuated their oppressors. This activity quite literally limits the consciousness of the oppressed, and disables their ability to see outside of the mental prison constructed by the oppressors.  

The Ministry of Education did not oppress me because I am not an employee of the Ministry, and my fellowship gave me the luxury of disengaging from it. I literally stopped showing up for final three months -- no one ever asked why. But of course not everyone is as lucky as me. So to the extent the Ministry fosters a culture of fear, a culture of mistrust, a culture that inhibits communication, a culture that treats friendly people who visit from abroad hoping to help and learn from you as risks rather than assets, well, I press upon the Ministry to consider what sort of pedagogy it is collectively practicing, and why it is that so many people I met who work there now or have worked there in the past or have to work with the Ministry in some other capacity describe the experience as oppressive and miserable. 

There, I had to get that off my chest. And now for the much more measured executive summary to my report. Thank you for reading and sharing and changing my own perceptions in so many extraordinary ways.

***

This report provides commentary and observation on New Zealand’s education system, with a focus on the roles that scientific evidence and data play within that system.

My report begins with a summary of efforts within New Zealand to privilege the role that scientific evidence plays in determining public policy, primarily through the Office of the Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand. These prominent efforts position New Zealand as an international leader on this issue, and create the background conditions upon which the scientific mindset might flourish within New Zealand’s public sector. I also include critical commentary on Sir Peter Gluckman’s efforts from prominent New Zealand thought leaders. I then briefly discuss existing efforts by the New Zealand Ministry of Education to promote science in education policy and practice, including the pending hiring of a departmental science advisor and the longstanding Best Evidence Synthesis programme.

As an interlude, the report briefly examines emerging research regarding “identity-protective cognition”, which suggests that individuals will be motivated to seek out evidence that affirms their standing within like-minded “affinity groups” that share certain beliefs and values. Because of this, they are motivated to reject evidence that challenges their loyalty to these groups. If this theory is correct, I argue that simply advocating for “more science” in and of itself is unlikely to lead to more (or better) science-informed decisions within the public sector. The education system in particular, I contend, at present comprises multiple affinity groups that have substantial trust issues with one another. This challenge threatens to block efforts to privilege science in education policy, on one side, and threatens to isolate practitioners from policymakers and prevent information interchange, on the other side.

In the next part of this report, and drawing upon my observations and conversations with educators throughout New Zealand, I examine three issues related to science, data and decisions in the education system that emerged in the course of my fellowship:

Science. I investigate whether science supports the claim that we know that learning must be “personalised”, as prominent education researchers in New Zealand have argued to the Ministry of Education and the education sector. I contend that major pillars of the definition of personalised learning that these researchers endorse rest on shaky scientific foundation, and are even contradicted by our best understanding of the science of cognition.

Data. I discuss two “data puzzles” affecting in aggregate nearly all of New Zealand’s public-school students. The first puzzle involves New Zealand’s National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) assessment system, and in particular, the persistent gap in student performance on different types of tests as a function of socioeconomic school ranking (i.e., by school decile). The second involves educators’ widespread suspicion regarding the validity of data generated by assessments related to New Zealand’s National Standards.

Decisions. I describe my failure to develop a list of specific education issues faced by educators that I had hoped to compile. Instead, I relay my finding that schools rarely treat decisions as discrete events. Issues and problems are treated more as preludes to extended conversations between school leaders and teachers, with decisions “accreting” over time. Nonetheless, I suggest that oral-language acquisition and the Numeracy Project are two issues that vex numerous educators at the moment and may be worth additional investigation.

The conclusion of the report offers two specific policy recommendations designed to build trust within New Zealand’s education system and expand educator access to existing scientific resources:

Sector Stewardships. I propose the Ministry of Education develop a new, voluntary programme aimed at building trust between the Ministry and the education sector, one school at a time. As envisaged, Ministry employees would be randomly matched with participating schools and then sent into the field to observe them in action. After observing, listening and talking with educators in their host schools, these Sector Stewards would return to the Ministry with the goal of identifying one single issue they might help their host schools to think through, with the Stewards’ support.

Digital Best Evidence Synthesis. I propose that the Ministry elevate the prominence and support for the Best Evidence Synthesis programme by bringing the BES into the digital age (Digital BES). I suggest the Ministry hire a data-visualisation designer to develop useful and interesting tools that harness the power of the information the Ministry possesses. I propose the Ministry also hire a digital BES communications director who understands how to use social media and other technology in order to make Digital BES an ongoing conversation between the Ministry, academic researchers, principals, teachers, parents and students. And I propose that the Digital BES effort engage with social scientists to evaluate effective communication strategies scientifically.

Finally, I attempt to stitch these disparate themes together by describing the education system using a scientific metaphor.

[kuranga]

Brief update and note

If you've swung by this blog in last month or so, you may have noticed some tumbleweeds drifting by. I should have explained earlier -- I've spent last month finalizing my fellowship report, working on a confidential project, and popping over to Australia for 10 days. Fun times but I've been "flat out" as the Kiwis say. 

I hope to resume blogging soon (I have about 36 posts stored in my mind) but in meantime, if you live in Wellington and are curious to know just what I've been up to for the past seven months, I'll be publicly presenting the findings from my report next week. Details:

12:30p to 1:30p on Monday 18 August

Nau Mai Room, Te Puni Kokiri, 143 Lambton Quay, Wellington

Registration site: https://www.ipanz.org.nz/Event?Action=View&Event_id=277

(Slightly misleading) report abstract: https://www.ipanz.org.nz/Folder?Action=View%20File&Folder_id=4&File=Benjamin%20Riley%20Axford%20report%20abstract.pdf

Stay tuned for more soon-ish!

[kuranga]

Burning Fires

This morning, I read this almost unimaginably thought-provoking story in The Atlantic regarding a textbook shortage in the Philadelphia public school district. If you haven't read it, stop whatever you are doing and do that now. This is what happens when someone who understands data wanders into the school system and discovers that while everyone is using electricity and lightbulbs outside, inside the school caves they're still using fire for luminescence. 

The story prompted a side conversation between me and my good friend Michelle McLaughlin, currently the executive director of Knowledge Alliance. Michele's position, which is perfectly reasonably and rational, is that if there's a shortage of books in Philadelphia, then they should, you know, buy more books. Ever the contrarian, I suggested in 140-character increments that a more entrepreneurial mindset would see the textbook shortage as an opportunity to rethink and reimagine the delivery of education, since, in my view, most textbooks that school districts might rush out to buy are mediocre to terrible. 

We took our conversation offline and then I ended up writing Michele a version of what I now post below. 

***

The specifics of what's happening Philly I do not know enough about to offer an opinion. For me, it’s a more fundamental question that I’ve been thinking about for many years — how can we improve our government? Because the truth is, I love government. I love the public sector. Yet I know, and I suspect you know, that most people when they engage with the public sector have an unpleasant experience, even when the sector is helping them.

 For example, my sister has severe mental health issues. She will likely be on Social Security Disability Insurance for the rest of her life. In many ways, the government is saving my sister from institutionalization, homelessness or prison. Even death.

 Yet, when I try to deal with the complexity of the system, when I am told by her alleged social worker that he won’t tell me if my sister has even made an appointment with her therapist “because of HIPAA laws”, when I desperately called her doctors and asked for her to be voluntarily admitted because she was on the verge of redlining only to have that request refused because “the police have not been called yet” (though they were the next day when she did redline and had to be taken from my mother’s house in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney) the system feels less like a supporting foundation and more like a crushing weight bearing down upon my entire family.

 So this is personal for me.

 There are problems in life where the solution can be as simple as do more of X. Problem: A school district official in Philly learns that some number of schools in her district do not have enough textbooks. Solution: Fiddle with budget, reallocate some funds, buy more textbooks. Problem solved.

 Jeffrey Sachs is spending his entire life making the case for this for problems slightly more complex. Problem: A village in Africa lacks the basic social welfare goods that most modern western societies now come to take for granted. Solution: Fiddle with the development budget, reallocate some funds, invest in comprehensive social welfare infrastructure.

 Problem solved? What does the evidence say?

 Living in New Zealand has made me realize, in ways that I probably should have but didn’t fully appreciate before, just how grim American poverty is. New Zealand poverty looks like our middle class. The moment where I was in a “decile 1A” school, the lowest end of their socio-economic classification system, and had to ask one of the teachers, um, is this school in a rough neighborhood? and she told me we were in one of the roughest in Auckland — that’s a moment that drove straight into my soul and will stay with me forever. New Zealand’s social safety is stronger, they invest more and I’m sorry America, we need to start looking at what is happening to our country and start thinking about what is happening at the bottom end of the tail.

 And yet, at the same time, we need to stop looking at the fires burning all around us and concluding, “hmm, need more fire engines.”

 What we need are smoke alarms.

 I cling to the naive belief that we can use government to solve problems without reinforcing and expanding the Kludgeocracy, as Steven Teles has called it. I believe for reasons I cannot explain that it’s possible for government to be human, helpful and kind. I believe that if we reoriented government away from talking to itself about policies that matter only to those who spend time talking about policies, and instead got people out of their damn offices and into the places where government should be helping to solve problems, interesting things would happen.

 Please note that I said help, not solve.

 We don’t have many solutions. But we could sure use a lot more help.

[kuranga]

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

- Richard Feynman

[kuranga]

Reflecting on New Zealand's Education System - Who Holds the Mirror?

“So, what do you think? Does New Zealand have a good education system?”

As my fellowship winds toward its conclusion, various teachers, parents, and friends have asked me to respond to this incredibly complex and impossible-to-answer question. My stock move has been to simply say , “I don’t know”, and then try to move to safer conversational ground. But after spending seven months here, and after visiting just under 1% of New Zealand's schools, and after spending nearly every waking minute trying to understand this country and its history and the complicated relationship between education, knowledge and democracy, I have formed a few opinions, however biased and misguided they may be. And so I’ll say this:

New Zealand’s education system is strong, and rightfully a source of national pride. The best public schools I visited here rival the quality some of the finest private schools I’ve seen in the United States. Apparently I’m not alone in thinking so, because many of these schools admit fee-paying international students (at least at secondary level) -- a phenomenon that I doubt is happening anywhere in my own country. Perhaps more importantly, the dedication of principals and teachers to their craft, to providing the best possible education to the majority of students in their care, was apparent in virtually every school visit.

At the other end of the decile spectrum, New Zealand has much to be proud of too. In the the middle of writing this report, I spoke with a former colleague of mine in the US about how impressed I was (and am) with the relative quality of the schools serving students in high poverty environments. In both urban and rural schools classified as decile 1A, I watched motivated teachers engage their students and endeavor to impart knowledge to the best of their abilities. 

There is one moment, however, that encapsulates my nagging and conflicted doubts. It happened midway through my fellowship, in week 10 of the first term, when I visited a high profile decile 1 primary school widely regarded as a leader in its use of digital technologies. During a quick classroom visit, I asked a student who’d spent the entire term studying native trees whether she could tell me a fact about them, but without looking at the Internet or the Google document she'd created.

She paused for a moment, looked at me, and said “they have...leaves?”

Now, any student surprised by a pop quiz delivered orally from a bearded American stranger might be forgiven for not being ready to provide full evidence of his or her learning. But when I later mentioned to the deputy principal of this school my concern regarding this student’s inability to articulate basic facts about New Zealand’s native trees, I was accused of bringing “middle class values” into this school. Naturally, I was offended, and exclaimed, “but surely if this student has any hope of attending university, they need to learn facts, and be able to recall them when asked!” Which is when the deputy principal replied, “well, of course that child isn’t going to tertiary”.

This student was nine years old.

Even today, months after this incident took place, I’m not sure what to think. On the one hand, steeped in my own cultural and very American values, I feel distraught that this educator would assume higher education simply wasn’t in this child’s future at such an early age. Yet, New Zealand is not the United States, and befitting this nation’s far more egalitarian ethos, Kiwis by and large do not assume “higher education” is the key to unlocking life happiness. So was it proper for me to feel outraged that this child appeared to already be the victim of low expectations -- or was I wrong to assume instead that this student needed tertiary education to live a meaningful life?

Even now, I don’t know how to answer that question. And so I think of what one friend and colleague at the Ministry of Education told me at some point during this strange journey:“What you are doing here, Ben, is holding up a mirror and asking us to look at ourselves.”

I’d like to think so, although I’m deeply uncertain. But this much is true: New Zealand certainly held up a mirror of its own. And I’m still trying to understand what I see.  

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Visiting Schools on the East Coast of New Zealand's North Island

Last week, I drove up the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island and visited five very different schools. I’ll confess that this area is by far my favorite in New Zealand; it combines the rugged rural beauty that so many associate with this country’s South Island with a large and visible Maori community presence -- the Ngati Porou iwi (or tribe) is particularly prominent. I’ll be posting photographs from my trip soon, but in meantime, here’s a summary of my school visits. Might want to grab a cup of coffee before you start, this is one long post.

Awapuni School (Gisborne)

Awapuni is a sprawling, decile three primary school serving approximately 270 students in Gisborne; 70% of the student body is Maori, and 60% are classified as special needs (Awapuni has a reputation for serving special-needs students). My overriding impression from my morning visit? Awapuni appears to have hit the sweet spot in creating a school culture that is both orderly and fun. I can’t prove that by anything other than my own senses, of course, but in my experience, school cultures are palpable, and Awapuni feels positive and nurturing while at the same time remaining disciplined.

Bridget Goodwin, a literary specialist teacher who serves in a sort of master-mentor role to other teachers, graciously walked me through a few classes. In her interaction with students, I could see Goodwin probing to see whether students understood the purpose of their tasks, and her questions were designed to surface their learning. I admit, I swooned. There are few things I find more inspiring (and reassuring) than seeing skilled educators use their professional expertise to discern what learning is taking place.

Although our conversation ranged across a number of subjects, three points stick out to me. First, like many others I’ve spoken to, Goodwin is not thrilled with the efffectiveness of new teachers prepared by some of New Zealand’s colleges of education. “They aren’t sufficient,” she said. “Some are better than others, but the amount of practicum [clinical training] is key. No amount of lectures can prepare you for [taking over] a classroom.” She also urges programs to show greater selectivity in admitting prospective teacher candidates. “Some programs will take anyone, let them miss class, and then let them make up later. That’s not the discipline you need. There must be some standards set.”

Second, Goodwin echoed the concern I’ve heard from so many primary school educators regarding the decline of students’ oral language abilities. Interestingly, she suggested more needs to be done to train and help parents in this regard. “There’s not a lot of professional development for teachers on this, much less parents,” she said. Awapuni is trying to make use of the programs that do exist, such as Reading Together, but Goodwin pointed out that of the 15 families that started the program, only four attended most of the sessions. “So it’s all well and good to have a program, but what’s the effect?”

Finally, on the technology front, Awapuni recently participated in the Ministry of Education’s School Network Upgrade Project, or SNUP. Things do not appear to have gone well; the wifi in the central office is no longer functioning; I was told that phone jacks were installed at eye level, creating dangling cords from the walls; and in at least one classroom the teacher’s whiteboard was projecting a Google Chrome browser that couldn’t get on the network. “We’ve had a lot of issues since this was done,” Goodwin dryly noted.

Gisborne Boys’ High School

Confession: my primary purpose in visiting Gisborne Boys’ High School, a decile three school serving approximately 750 students (all boys), was to learn the haka. For non-New Zealand readers, you may be familiar with the haka as the group dance-and-chant that takes place when the New Zealand All-Blacks rugby team take the field. But of course, the history of the haka is much richer than just rugby, and stems from longstanding cultural practices of the Maori people.

So when my friend Tim Gander, a physical education teacher at GBHS, invited me to join him and his Year 9 and 10 students for an hour of haka practice, how could I say no? And so I spent an hour practicing the Gisborne Boys’ haka, with the words “turane tanga!” still echoing in my ears a week later. I also managed to bruise my right arm from slapping it so hard, and split my trousers wide open when launching into my crouch. Did the boys standing behind me find this amusing? Why yes, yes they did. It was also fascinating to see the two Year 13 students leading the haka, taking control of the auditorium, and passing along this tradition to younger students. I will not soon forget being told that, as we smacked our chests, we were actually “taking hold of our mana” and drawing power from it -- and then destroying our enemies and tossing them to the ground “because they are nothing!” A masculine moment, to say the least.

After changing into my spare jeans, I spent an hour chatting with some of Tim’s students on a variety of subjects. I was surprised that the majority (though not all) of the boys are glad that GBHS is an all-boys school; “it helps us focus,” said one, an observation that accords with recent research here in New Zealand. I spent a good 15 minutes talking with another student who impressed me with the depth of his intelligence and maturity and frankly courage. Gisborne Boys’ is known for its strong emphasis on sports, particularly rugby, but this student decided to stop playing because he “didn’t like the way it was turning people into social monsters.”

This student also twisted a tiny proverbial dagger into my gut when I asked about NCEA. Both he and the student sat next to him achieved NCEA Level II despite only attending school roughly 40% of the time. “There’s a lot of students like us,” he said. “We aren’t challenged, so we don’t bother to show up.” His friend added, “we know how to game the system.” I can’t say whether these two students are representative of a significant number of students in New Zealand’s education system. What I can say is that bright students attending schools in low decile areas deserve an education that challenges them and encourages them to attend school.

East Coast area school

The next stop on my east coast tour involved the hardest school visit I’ve experienced in New Zealand. I’m leaving the school anonymous for reasons that will become clear momentarily.

This school is classified as decile 1A, which means according to the New Zealand classification system, it serves students in families at the very tail end of income distribution. The education challenge facing such communities is often enormous, and by numerous accounts, this school represents a marked improvement from its predecessors. Among other things, there’s been a visible investment in new buildings and creating a “modern learning environment.” Candidly, this sort of investment in rural schools is hard to find in the US, and it’s to New Zealand’s credit that this community is not being neglected when it comes to infrastructure investment.

At the same time, after spending an hour at this school with some senior students, I have to say that I observed virtually no learning taking place. Students were sprawled about watching hip-hop videos on YouTube, playing computer games, and taking selfies. I spoke with a group of students in one corner who weren’t even pretending to be working whether they found the school challenging -- they all said no (or at least the three who engaged with me did, two girls could not be bothered to look up from their phones). One student told me he’d recently transferred to this school from Gisborne Boys’ where “it was much harder. Here, we don’t really have to do anything.” Another student who recently transferred from Australia echoed this view -- “it’s much much easier,” he said.

Perhaps aware that the school was not having its finest moment, one teacher pulled me aside to explain how they’d soon be tweaking their model for the next school term. Instead of giving all students equal freedom to “pursue their own learning,” they will be placed into groups, with those demonstrating achievement given more latitude whereas some will be required to be with a teacher at most times during the day. It’s encouraging to see recognition of a problem and I’m glad this school is taking steps to address it. At the same time, this teacher pointed to a chart on the wall listing certain vague skills (e.g., “participating and contributing,” “relating to others”) and said to me, “it’s more important that students leave with these rather than maths, English, science.” As I said to him directly, I hold the opposite view, and believe those skills should seen as the happy consequence of a successful content-rich education. To his credit, he appeared to take this under thoughtful consideration.

Te Kura o Hiruharama (Hiruharama School)

The next leg of my east coast tour was guided by Ivan Lomax, a former school principal who among other things now facilitates the Computers in Homes programme in the east coast area. He also happens to live in stunning Tokamaru Bay, near the old freezing works that if I had enough time would be the subject of separate blog post in its own right (some history here).

Ivan first took me to Te Kura o Hiruharama primary school, another decile 1A rural primary school serving just over 100 students in Years 1 through 8. The principal Sue Ngarimu-Goldsmith spent a good hour with me talking about issues facing her school and important decisions she’s grappling with.

For example, she walked me through a quick case study involving maths education at Hiruharama. Starting in 2011, and based on data from New Zealand assessments such as the PAT and e-asTTle, as well as “official teacher judgments” within the school, Ngarimu-Goldsmith believed her school could improve in its maths education. “It was an issue of teacher knowledge and making best use of current resources, and integrating them in clever ways,” she told me. To that end, Ngarimu-Goldsmith engaged an external consultant to engage in direct professional development with teachers at Hiruharama. Teachers also were sent to maths conferences to get more exposure.

Three years later, I asked Ngarimu-Goldsmith if her chosen intervention of teacher professional development was working. She gave a refreshingly candid and insightful response. “In terms of teacher voice, there’s improved confidence. But I can’t do comparative data [in terms of student achievement] because we’ve had an influx of students [note: two other schools in the area recently closed]. I’m trying to track the kids who’ve been here but it’s very time consuming to disaggregate the raw data.”

In my view, this is an important issue. In numerous schools I’ve visited, educators have identified problems, reviewed the research, and chosen a particular solution but have run into roadblocks when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of the interventions they’ve chosen. While I know of no easy solution, this area seems fertile territory for a dialogue between New Zealand schools and the Ministry of Education around how to provide schools with the support they need to determine what’s working, and what’s not.

After chatting with Sue and Ivan, the three of us visited a vibrant class (I believe it was Year 6) where students explained how they build their own traps (or craypots) to catch delicious New Zealand crayfish. This was part of a unit on hunting and fishing, and so when I asked this class how many of the students had killed a pig, all of their arms eagerly shot up. Note: by killing a pig, I mean these kids have actually stabbed the pig in the neck as it’s being attacked by hunting dogs. Incredible. Not long afterward, we trundled outside and I gave the students NASA solar glasses to stare at the sun, leading to this fantastic moment:

Try not to focus on the one student who is staring without glasses and probably is blind now. Also, one student asked me what the glasses are made of that makes them safe -- great question! And as I told him at the time -- I have no idea! Some subsequent googling suggests solar filters “usually have a thin layer of aluminum, chromium or silver deposited on their surfaces that attenuates ultraviolet, visible, and infrared energy.” So there you have it.

The class then sang me a song and I got a little teary because I realized my time in New Zealand is coming to an end soon, and this particular moment was precisely why I came to this country in the first place, to engage with educators and students and try to gain a least a little understanding of a culture different than my own. Let’s move on.

Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Kawakawa Mai Tawhiti

The final stop on my whirlwind tour of the east coast involved a late-afternoon conversation with Campbell Dewes, the principal of Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Kawakawa Mai Tawhiti (which I’ll abbreviate as KMT). Located in Hicks Bay, KMT is one of the 63 Kura Kaupapa Maori schools in New Zealand that provide full-language immersion instruction in te reo Maori. The history behind these schools could fill many books (much less this already epic-length blog post), but suffice to say I was eager to peer inside one of them. Unfortunately, classes had already concluded for the day but Principal Dewes was kind enough to spend 90 minutes talking with me.

Our conversation was thought provoking, challenging and salty.  Dewes spent the first half hour of our chat talking about the history of New Zealand and “Anglo Saxon ideology.” In Dewes’ estimation, this ideology largely failed Maori students but until relatively recently, this didn’t matter because “there was always a good job at the railroads.” Those jobs are gone, however, and so Dewes believes education is critical -- education that must be provided in the Maori language. “If we don’t have language, we don’t have the key to our culture,” he said repeatedly.

Unfortunately, I arrived too late to observe any classroooms, so I can’t opine on the quality of education being provided at KMT. In Dewes’ view, the evidence for the success is “irrefutable” because of the academic results of the school, with 100% of students achieving NCEA Level II and 80% achieving university entrance qualification. Of course, as he amusingly noted, there are only five Year 13 students, so that 80% figure means four out of five qualified, but “that’s statistics, take it up with the Greeks.” Even more interestingly, as far as NCEA is concerned, “we use externals to back up our internals. We have had accusations in past -- ‘oh those Maori are fudging the results’ -- and so we tell them, we’re doing externals.” When I mentioned the gap between internal and external performance in NZ schools as a function of deciles, he replied, “that’s an issue. The mainstream system -- it’s [rhymes with ducked].” (Like I said, salty.)

On another controversial note, Dewes holds some strong views regarding New Zealand’s national standards. In his view, they are a “secondary statute” that are trumped by the primary statute that authorized the Kura Kaupapa schools. And so they’ve retained legal counsel and appear prepared to fight battle out in court. I spent five years litigating precisely these sorts of issues for the State of California, so it’s interesting to see they occur here in this relatively non-litigious country too.

Finally, Dewes was a veritable treasure trove of quotes and provocative statements (he reminded me of Governor Jerry Brown in that way). My favorite, which he used to underscore the value of hard work: “The only time you start at the top is when you’re digging a hole.” Indeed.

***

I’m grateful to Ivan Lomax, Tim Gander (who housed me in Gisborne), and the many educators and students who took the time to speak with me for this eye-opening journey -- thank you, all of you.

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The Ideology of Personalization

Should we seek to personalize learning in education? Just over a week ago, I posted a short essay with a provocative headline suggesting that to the extent personalized learning represents a coherent theory of pedagogical practice, it runs counter to our best present understanding of cognition. The piece seems to have touched a nerve, as it prompted a flurry of comments and responses in social media and the, er, blogosphere, and traffic to this site skyrocketed. I’m grateful to all those who took the time to read and respond (thank you) and even more pleased to see this issue debated in respectful fashion. Over the next week or so, I hope to respond to many of the issues that various parties have raised, but I’ll begin with the thoughtful and nuanced three-part affirmative case for personalized learning offered by my friend Alex Hernandez.

First, Alex argues that “personalized learning honors student variation in background knowledge and intelligence.” No one could reasonably dispute that students, like all humans, vary in their cognitive abilities. The question is whether we should be orienting our pedagogical practices primarily around these differences, as I think most personalized-learning supporters would urge, or should we instead take note of the many ways in which students are cognitively similar, and make these shared characteristics the focus of our education policies and practices? The former is not without its romantic appeal, but the latter finds greater support from those who study how our minds work:

There is no doubt that students have individual differences that are both situational and preferential. And there is no doubt that effective teachers address these differences using their own experience as a guide. But when it comes to applying research to the classroom, it seems inadvisable to categorize students into more and more specialized groups on the basis of peripheral differences when education and cognitive sciences have made significant progress in describing the core competencies all students share. Teachers can make great strides in improving student achievement by leveraging this body of research and teaching to commonalities, not differences.

(Willingham & Daniel 2012, my emphasis).

Does this mean I’m against any and all efforts to differentiate instruction? Not at all. As I argued in my original post, I believe we should set common expectations around what students should know at particular points in time, and when some students fall behind these expectations, their teachers should identify strategies to help them. In contrast, Alex contends that “arbitrary, age-based academic standards and fixed pacing guides” prevent differentiation. Yet without common goals (or standards, if you prefer), there’s no obvious framework to guide the differentiation process. If a student is lagging behind their peers, is that cause for concern, or simply evidence that their learning is poised to take off at some unidentified point in the future? This is the same tension that Tom Loveless identified in his article about US curriculum wars, namely, that the philosophy underpinning personalized learning is difficult to square with the goals of the current Common Core effort. After all, the Common Core standards are sequenced by grade level, and grade levels are based on age. Is this any more arbitrary than setting age cutoffs for children who participate in youth athletics?

Second, Alex argues for personalized learning on the grounds that it can provide more feedback to students. “In personalized learning environments, students theoretically have access to ample, frequent and actionable feedback from multiple sources, including content, peers and teachers.” But more doesn’t necessarily mean better. The question is whether these varied sources can and will provide meaningful feedback in ways that improve student learning. Luckily, these are testable claims. We’ll revisit this topic momentarily.

Third, Alex posits that students need to “own their learning.” Respectfully, I think this simply reiterates the aspirational goals of personalized learning, rather than offering any substantive evidence on its behalf. Of course we need to organize our schools to promote “acquiring background knowledge, accruing expertise and developing independent learning,” as Alex urges, and who could argue against children growing and developing confidence as learners? The relevant question, however, is whether personalized learning strategies are an effective way of achieving these ends. You cannot strengthen your argument by reasserting the conclusion you hope to reach.

Having finished with his affirmative case, then, Alex does something both commendable and rare: he acknowledges that the evidence in support of personalized learning is, in his words, abysmal. Just how bad? Here’s a quick chart pulled together from John Hattie’s meta-analysis of 130 specific education interventions:

Whether you find this data persuasive or not will depend on how much stock you put in meta-analysis, but at a minimum, it certainly doesn’t help the personalization cause. So to the extent personalized learning has generated testable hypotheses, the evidence suggests the theory is flawed. And while Alex and others may believe that prior personalization efforts may have lacked the “resources, capacity and technology” to succeed, note that this line of argument can be invoked to explain the failed implementation of any policy or practice. “A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific,” as Karl Popper wrote, and that seems to be where we’ve landed with personalized learning.

Alex concludes his defense of personalization with the observation that “power is shifting from institutions to consumers across the economy, and I still haven’t heard a compelling argument as to why education should be different than other sectors in this regard.” Well, I’m not sure if it’s compelling, but here’s my argument: power is not the same thing as technology, and by definition students are not yet educated consumers of knowledge (that’s what makes them students). In my view, the burden of persuasion should rest with those who would seek to dramatically reorient our education system despite the historical and present-day evidence suggesting their favored approach won’t work for many students, particularly students living in poverty.

Put another way, personalized learning is more ideology than scientific theory. There’s nothing inherently wrong with adopting an ideology per se; among other things, they are often useful devices to orient social groups toward specific goals. But ideologies that are not in harmony with science and human behaviour typically generate all sorts of unhappiness (see USSR, 1917-1992). And I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we spent a greater proportion of our education-related efforts on incorporating the insights of cognitive science into our education decisions. Doing so would require suspending, or at least striving to suspend, some of our well-intentioned-but-possibly-profoundly-mistaken ideological predispositions, and focusing instead on building bridges between those capable of providing scientific insight into how children learn, and the practitioners responsible for imparting that learning. What might our education systems look like if we made this central to our activities?

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Visiting Naenae College

Recently, New Zealand’s Education Review Office -- a sort of accrediting body that reviews and reports on New Zealand’s public schools -- issued an interesting report that identified seven secondary schools located in high-poverty areas that are achieving “better outcomes for students than other similar schools.” Last Friday, I had the opportunity to visit one of those schools, Naenae College in Lower Hutt (a suburb of Wellington), a decile two school serving approximately 750 students of remarkably diverse backgrounds: 27% Maori, 25% Pasifika, 22% European, 15% Asian, and 11% “other” which includes students from Africa, the Middle East, and South America.

My visited started with an extended conversation with principal John Russell about the issues facing Naenae, important decisions he’s been grappling with, and the role of data and evidence in that process. One issue that he highlighted immediately involved improving literacy. “Some kids are arriving two years behind where they need to be,” Russell said. “This is blocking all their learning. But, we also have to understand what it’s like for a student who may be coming out the war in Myanmar and the last time [the student] saw their parents was when they were ripped out of their hands.”

To address this, Naenae embarked on a data-intensive effort to raise student literacy. They joined a “LEAP” cluster (Literacy Enhancing Achievement Project) with five primary schools and Naenae Intermediate to work jointly on the problem. According to Russell, they discovered that student performance in particular areas, such as, persuasive writing, was hugely affected by the choice of topic students were given. For example, they saw a huge drop when students were asked to write about whether they should be given laptops or not. Later in our conversation, when I asked about the need for a common student data system, he acknowledged that primary schools “are reporting [data] in different ways. People assess on a different scale, though usually there is some underpinning to e-ASTTLE [New Zealand assessment tool] you can work from.”

Our conversation then progressed to NCEA. Here, Russell showed me an interesting “ladder of success” graphic that represents three pathways for students at Naenae College:

Using this rubric, and as you might expect, NCEA Level II certification, if based on unit standards (pass/fail), falls within vocational training, whereas NCEA Level II if based on achievement standards ranks higher on the ladder (though still below university entrance). Does this mean that NCEA Level II certification means the same thing for student who achieve it? “Absolutely not -- it’s very different,” Russell said. “The 85% goal is just a mantra.” Like many here, Russell sees this as a feature of the system, though not without its own set of challenges. “Kids here can get a bucket of credit for Maori performing arts. Now, some kids are on the marae every weekend rehearsing and practicing for this, it’s intensive stuff. They should get credit, so how do we recognize that while acknowledging 40 credits in that, the job is not finished, and that literacy, numeracy must be there as well?”

In the afternoon, I talked Martin Laing, an English teacher at Naenae College and he echoed similar thoughts around the tradeoffs presented by NCEA. “On surface, I like that students can achieve in something if they’re not good at a subject. The bad things is that students can pick and choose and avoid subjects they need because they know they can bulk up [with other credits.” To solve for this, Laing believes students should be required to obtain a certain number of credits through external assessment (he suggested somewhere between 10 to 20), and that there be a cap on the number of credits awarded in any particular subject (no more than 25). “Otherwise students can muck around and it can become unbalanced.”

Speaking of students, a few that I spoke to seemed to agree with point on NCEA. “I took physical education because it’s easier to get excellence in that than English,” one Year 10 boy told me. “It’s a bit stressful, because if you fail you have to repeat it,” said another girl in the same class, “but it makes you work harder, care more about learning.”

During that same conversation, one girl said something that I’m still thinking about. “Look, we’re a ‘low’ school. We get stereotyped. Yet, we achieve so much for the budget we’re on.” And there was general agreement among the students that Naenae College’s emphasis on Te Whanau Tahi (the united family) created a strong school culture. “We’re all like siblings, eh?” said one girl. “There’s no bullying here. Over the years, we’ve built relationships with people throughout school, not just our friends. We celebrate our culture.”

I’ll have more to say about another aspect of my visit in a future post. In the meantime, I’m grateful to principal John Russell, his staff, and the students of Naenae College for welcoming me into their school.

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Don't Personalize Learning

In the US, “personalized learning” is what I think of as a head-nodder phrase. Sprinkle the word into virtually any conversation or speech regarding education, and you’ll typically see at least a handful of heads nodding in the room in happy agreement. While some might view this as positive evidence for the merits of personalization, I suspect what’s really happening is that the idea is being treated as an empty vessel into which one may pour any number of competing theories of learning or favored education policies. A term that can mean anything often signifies nothing.

What many people seem to mean by “personalized learning” is that it should involve using technology to give students more freedom to control their education experience. “Blended learning involves leveraging the Internet to afford each student a more personalized learning experience, meaning increased student control over the time, place, path, and/or pace of his or her learning,” declares the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. We must “empower learners to learn any time, any place and at any pace, both in school and beyond,” according to the recently released Learners at the Center of the Networked World report from the Aspen Institute. “Instead of organizing students by age and giving them all the same lesson, [students may] initiate their own learning, may follow different paths, and seek varied resources to help them meet their goals,” says my friend Alex Hernandez of the Charter Schools Growth Fund.

Although there are a number of nested assumptions and hypotheses built into these definitions, I want to focus on two: (1) Students will learn more than they do presently if they have more power over what they learn (“the path argument”); and (2) students will learn more than they do presently if they have more power over when they learn (“the pace argument”).

First, the problem with the path argument is that it runs afoul of our current understanding of cognition. Put simply, knowledge is cumulative. What a child is capable of learning depends upon what she already knows. When a child encounters new information, if she lacks the preexisting knowledge to put the information in context, she will quickly become frustrated. She won’t learn. So to the extent personalization seeks to devolve a greater degree of the responsibility of acquiring new knowledge to students, it relies on the mistaken assumption that many or most students are properly equipped to make sense of new information:

There is a large body of research which shows that not all learners prefer nor profit from controlling the tasks and that forcing such control on them can be counterproductive...The reason for this is that learners do not have or do not know how to utilize appropriate strategies when they are left to themselves to manage their learning environment (i.e., they do not have the capacity to appraise both the demands of the task and their own learning needs in relation to that task in order to select appropriate instruction). In other words, learners often misregulate their learning, exerting control in a misguided or counterproductive fashion and not achieving the desired result.

(Paul A. Kirschner & Jeroen J.G. van Merriënboer (2013) Do Learners Really Know Best? Urban Legends in Education, Educational Psychologist, 48:3, 169-183.)

Of course, as Dan Willingham told me after reviewing a draft of this post, “it’s possible to imagine versions of the path that are cumulative” and tailored to an individual student’s ability or interests, it’s just that students are unlikely to find this path if they themselves “pick what to study next.” I am of the increasingly controversial view that we created the profession we call “teaching” largely to solve for this problem. Students need to be guided down the path of their learning. Teachers should remain central to the activity of imparting knowledge to students.

Second, the problem with the pace argument is that it too contradicts one of the key insights from cognitive science: our minds are not built to think. In fact, our brains are largely oriented to avoid thinking. That’s because thinking is hard. And often not fun, at least at first. As a result, we will naturally gravitate away from activities that we find hard and unpleasant. Willingham warns me that I’m seemingly implying we never think about challenging subjects, but of course that’s not true. In his view, “difficulty is [a] key variable...the response [from people who support personalization using technology] is that it's easier to make things engaging with tech. That may be right, but there haven't been very many good examples so far.” 

This is also why I think it’s a mistake to place children in charge of the speed  of their learning, particularly during the early years of their education. If left to decide for themselves, many kids -- and particularly those from at-risk backgrounds -- will choose a relatively slow velocity of learning (again, because thinking is hard). The slow pace will lead to large knowledge deficits compared to their peers, which will cause them to slow down further, until eventually they “switch off” from school. The only way to prevent this slow downward spiral for these students is to push them harder and faster. But they need to be pushed, which means we should not cede to them control of the pace of their learning.

My personalization skepticism will no doubt prompt a slew of objections. Let me now anticipate and partially defuse three of them.

Wait, you aren’t really suggesting we return to the "factory model” of education, are you?

To the extent that the so-called factory model involves the dry recitation of facts to students in a flat monotone voice and devoid of meaningful student interaction apart from taking attendance, no, I am not. (Though feel free to watch this clip to see an alternative pop-culture example of effective “factory model instruction” taking place.) What I am saying is to the extent the factory-model stereotype represents what’s actually happening in classrooms, the problem is not the seating arrangement or lack of smartphones, it’s the pedagogy. Effective instruction requires understanding the varying cognitive abilities of students and finding ways to impart knowledge in light of that variation. If you want to call that “personalization,” fine, but we might just also call it “good teaching.” And good teaching can be done in classroom with students sitting in desks in rows, holding pencil and paper, or it can also be done in a classroom with students sitting in beanbags holding iPads and Chromebooks. Whatever the learning environment, the teacher should be responsible for the core delivery of instruction.

Are you against technology in schools?

Not at all. In fact, I think there are many ways in which technology can improve education, as many schools and educators are demonstrating worldwide. Here’s one example that strikes me as particularly interesting -- using an iPad with the Educreations app, teachers can literally see and hear students struggling to grasp specific concepts, and reflect on what to do next. I also believe that the ubiquitous use of technology will make our schools rich with almost real-time data on student learning that can be quickly analyzed and acted upon in beneficial ways. (Insert standard “provided the proper privacy safeguards are in place” proviso here.)

At the same time, I have little doubt that technology can hinder education too. In both the US and New Zealand, I’ve visited technology-rich classrooms where virtually no learning appeared to be taking place. And even when learning appears to be happening, there’s always a risk that the appearance is deceiving:

The fact that students make use of many electronic devices and are called digital natives, does not make them good users of the media that they have at their disposal. They can Google but lack the information skills to effectively find the information they need, and they also do not have the knowledge to adequately determine the relevance or truth of what they have found (Walraven, Brand-Gruwel, & Boshuizen, 2008). This leads to essays on Baconian science with texts about the 20th-century British artist Francis Bacon and on the problems that Martin Luther King had with Pope Leo X and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

(Kirschner & Merriënboer, cited above.)

Having said that, and just to reiterate, my argument is not against technology. Instead, what I contend is that many personalization enthusiasts support a theory of instruction that is difficult to harmonize with our best present understanding of how the mind works. If “children are more alike than different in how they think and learn,” as Dan Willingham argues, then one of the major pillars underlying the push personalization crumbles. So I believe we should adopt a more skeptical posture regarding some of the grandiose claims about the benefits of personalizing learning, and shift the burden of persuasion to its proponents to explain why they believe it will improve student learning in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary.

There’s an awful lot of Dan Willingham here. How much of your argument is based solely on his conclusions?

When I first read Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School?, it made me angry. It angered me because many of my preexisting notions about education and instruction were directly challenged or even contradicted -- including my beliefs about the value of personalization. And so I engaged in a bit of “motivated reasoning,” and read some of the underlying research he cites, hoping to find it lacking. Yet the more I read, the more I struggled to find gaps in the logic or evidence. At some point, it dawned on me that I was contributing to the very problem that I had so often decried in education policy. Namely, I was committed to an ideological position regardless of the evidence. That’s when I changed my mind about personalization.

Of course, not everyone reacts to Willingham this same way. For example, in their book Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn suggest that personalization will benefit students in part because (they claim) students have different learning styles, and personalization allows for the tailoring of instruction to each particular style. This idea make extraordinary intuitive sense, yet is entirely unsupported in the scientific literature, as Willingham explains at length. Horn seems to have subsequently read Willingham’s book after Disrupting Class was published, so he (Horn) now eschews learning styles as a “bad example” of personalization. But when does something pass from bad example to evidence that your theory is wrong?

***

In closing, the stakes here are high. There is a tremendous amount of energy behind “personalized learning” and in support of policies and practices tied to its loose vision for the future of education. Perhaps it will lead to tremendous learning gains as it unleashes learners to pursue their true passions and learn at a time, place and pace of their choosing. But if we’re wrong about this, we may actually compound the challenges faced by the students who are most in need of guidance and support from the professional experts we call teachers. And we won’t see heads nodding anymore.

Disclosure: I’m on leave from an organization that funds Educreations, and Dan Willingham is serving as an academic mentor for my fellowship in New Zealand. He also reviewed and offered comments to a draft of this piece, as indicated above.

[kuranga]

Visiting Maruia School

On the whiteboard in small -- and I mean small -- rural school in South Island:

Seems so simple when issues are framed this way, in straightforward and sequential fashion. Of course decisions in the real world rarely present themselves so neatly, but these five words touch upon virtually every choice educators and policymakers face.  

Let me back up a moment. A few weeks ago, I visited Maruia School on New Zealand’s South Island, a remote, decile eight school serving 18 students from Years 1 to 13. This is the smallest public school I’ve ever visited, and likely will ever visit in my lifetime. (Good luck finding the school’s website -- there isn’t one.) The principal and part-time teacher at Maruia School, Peter King, was gracious enough to let me spend the afternoon talking with him about issues and decisions within his school, and to spend time with his vivacious students.

One major issue facing Mauria School involves transient students and the education challenges posed when their parents move. “Children are coming in with learning needs because they are transient,” King told me, “which is the same issue that lower-decile city schools face, but for different reasons.” This transience is driven in part by New Zealand’s growing dairy industry. “Once corporate dairy moved into the valley, it entirely changed the community makeup.” From King’s perspective, this effect is largely positive. “Dairy industry takes notice of the quality of schools -- it’s part of the equation to attract people to come here.” (Point to ponder: Could the Ministry of Education work together with dairy providers to provide support to area schools, perhaps using some sort of public-private partnership?)

King also raised the new Investing in Education Success Act, New Zealand’s new initiative to create new executive principal and teacher roles for clusters of schools. Like many others, King thinks the clustering should be based on similarity of school type, rather than geographic proximity (a logical position given Mauria’s isolation). While he’s skeptical of some aspects of the IES policy -- “the executive principals are likely to come from big secondary schools, so what affinity will they have with us?” -- overall he seems cautiously optimistic “if it’s done in collaborative fashion.”

One now discarded policy that many rural educators have mentioned to me: “Country Service.” From what I’m told, at some point in the past newly trained teachers were required to spend two years teaching in remote areas of New Zealand. (Faint shades of Teach For America.) King, like others, believes this policy helped send some of New Zealand’s most talented new teachers into areas they otherwise were unlikely to work in. Equally interesting, at least to me, is that many rural schools New Zealand own houses or other property that they provide to teachers as an incentive, at a subsidized rate. I’m curious to learn more about both of these initiatives and whether there is research on their impact on teacher recruitment and retention.

As for the students, well, they were a talkative bunch who were quite surprised to have an American visitor. I didn’t conduct any real classroom observation -- the term seems somewhat of a misnomer with only 18 kids -- and I couldn’t assess the unusual dynamics that can arise when you have a wide range of age groups under one roof. (I know from personal experience having attended a small, rural, isolated school in California that had its elementary, junior high and high school all on one campus, although mercifully we had separate buildings for each. The bus rides were daily adventures in bullying, however.) But I had a fun time asking the kids to identify my hometown of Seattle on a hastily drawn map of the US. One student got pretty close, but many seemed to want to relocate Seattle from Washington to Texas -- which may be what’s happening in Austin already!

[kuranga]

Why should we value science?

Presented these five quotes to a small group of 15 New Zealand educators today, and asked them to pick which one resonated most strongly.

A. "Science should serve a privileged role [in society]. That privilege comes from its set of standard operating procedures that limit the place of values in the knowledge it produces."

B. "Scientific knowledge is privileged because it stands to scrutiny by scientists with a diverse range of values -- not because it is value-free."

C. "Scientists may be authorities on the natural world but 'do not have minimal understanding of the way that the world of human beings operates in general,' and may have become scientists to 'escape into a world where problems are not on a human scale, but microscopic or astronomic.'”

D. "A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it 'soul-less scientism'—which believes that [science] can eliminate all mystery, and give a complete account of human life, thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God."

E. "Science is committed to two ideals: (1) the world is intelligible; and (2) acquiring knowledge is hard. To understand the world, we must cultivate work-arounds for our cognitive limitations, including skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests."

Somewhat unexpectedly, six voted for (B) and nine voted for (E) -- everything else was blanked. So who said what?

A) Sir Peter Gluckman, Chief Science Advisor to the Prime Minister of New Zealand

B) Shaun Hendy, physicist at University of Auckland

C) Professor Gary Hawke, former head of School of Government at Victoria University (quoting economist Wilfred Beckerman)

D) Leon Krass, bioethics advisor to President George W. Bush

E) Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist at Harvard

[kuranga]

Visiting Nelson College for Girls

Last week, I wrote about my conversation with a group of Year 12 students at Nelson College for Girls. This week, I wanted to provide more details from my visit to that remarkable school.

First, some quick background facts. Nelson College for Girls is an all-girls secondary school that serves just under 1,100 students in Years 9 to 13. In addition, NCG also operates a small intermediate (or prep) school serving approximately 100 students in Years 7-8, but with the interesting wrinkle that it’s a private school (meaning students pay fees to attend) yet governed by NCG’s public board of trustees. Apparently this is only one of two publicly governed but privately financed schools in New Zealand, and it sounds complicated. About 150 students board at NCG and just under 50 are international, fee-paying students. As you might imagine given the range of students being served, the physical campus is sprawling and without help I would have been lost trying to navigate (luckily, the students and staff happily helped me find my way).

My major impression of NCG after an almost-full day of meetings and classroom observations? Put simply, the quality of instruction and the vibrancy of the students would rival any of the most prestigious private schools I’ve visited in the US. This is a school staffed by teachers who approach their craft with a clear sense of purpose, and populated with students who take their education just as seriously.

Let’s start with the educators. Here is one English teacher describing the professional approach she and other English teachers take to guide their teaching-as-inquiry: “This is a data-driven process. We do not do an inquiry without reading expert research. In fact, we put this into our appraisals as well.” When I asked what support might be useful around this, this teacher told me that “sometimes finding the research can be difficult” -- a sentiment many other teachers have echoed -- and “some teachers are long removed from the university, so whether they know how to process research, and evaluate whether it’s scientific [is unclear].” (I am contractually obligated to note that Dan Willingham’s written a guidebook for educators on this very subject.) This teacher pleaded for time to do this because “we’ve got a very burdened teaching profession. There’s a massive amount of assessment, and we are the markers and moderators and we’ve added and added to the load. When does the pot flow over?” She also cited John Hattie, Michael Fullan and the Ministry of Education’s Best Evidence Synthesis as examples of quality research that is helpful for practitioners. (I agree.)

Later that day, I walked into a roomful of 25 students barely making a noise as they diligently worked on their maths assignment. Again, the maths teacher evidenced a “no nonsense” approach to the cognitive demands of truly understanding mathematics (perhaps because she has an actual master’s degree in the subject -- a rarity in the US and I suspect in New Zealand too). “They can say what they want, but repetition is key [to learning basic maths facts],” this teacher said. “We almost need to start from scratch with students, and undo bad practices” from the intermediate schools. “Their basic number skills are bad. They come in and cannot divide at all. They do not see multiplication as multiple addition.” The culprit, this teacher believes, is the Numeracy Projects. “Intermediate schools are giving kids too many strategies, they can’t decide which is better. In maths, there should be freedom...but there is also order.”

This is not the first criticism I’ve heard from New Zealand educators regarding the Numeracy Projects. I’ve also heard one senior Ministry official observe that adoption of the Numeracy Projects roughly correlates with the downward trend of national student performance in maths, at least as measured by international exams such as PISA. As this official noted, correlation is not causation, but I think there’s enough evidence to warrant a closer look at the Numeracy Projects.I have no desire to start the New Zealand equivalent of the US “math wars” but I do think additional research is warranted to assess the true impact, positive or negative, this intervention has had. (Research that may be underway already, for all I know, and some have hinted to me that the Numeracy Projects is already being phased out.)

In any event, NCG is routing around the problem somewhat through use of the University of Canterbury’s Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM) assessments, which are administered to students in Years 7 and 9. According to Cathy Ewing, principal of NGC, the CEM tests are very useful in providing longitudinal data on student progress at the critical “transition points” from primary to intermediate to secondary schooling. Interestingly, by administering a (gasp) standardized test in this fashion, it’s possible to identify patterns among feeder schools sending students to NCG. What if the Ministry of Education funded these tests for all schools in New Zealand? “The Ministry could use that data to provide feedback to the primary schools and address issues at the start. We’ve got real problems with numeracy and my maths department thinks we could identify the schools that struggling.”

Some other items of note:

- Ruth Elmey, NCG’s director of e-learning, was gracious enough to shepherd me from class to class all afternoon during my visit. She said very positive things about the new Network 4 Learning. “I’ve had nothing but a fantastic experience,” she said. “They have a crack team that wants to do best by schools, and they just power ahead.” Given the complexity of NCG’s campus, Elmey admitted the IT networking there is “complex” but N4L employees have “beavered away and been proactive.”

- I continue to be fascinated New Zealand’s single-sex schooling and wonder about benefits and costs, from a pedagogical perspective. The administrators at NCG are convinced it’s beneficial overall, but as one teacher said to me, “it’s fantastic to let the girliness come out, but they can lack resiliency. Some want to be spoon fed.”

- Here’s a fascinating Freakonomics-style hypothesis that some graduate student should investigate (and then basque in the inevitable press attention when they publish their research): they think girls are smoking less because they’re spending their spare money on topping up their smartphones.

- Brain teaser that stumped me when I walked into one of the intermediate classes: can you add a single line to make the following statement true? No Googling the answer!

10  10  10 = 9:50

Hint: to get the solution, you'll have to think creatively -- and cleverly, too.

- More criticism for New Zealand’s colleges of education. “There’s a total disconnect. Too many haven’t been in the classroom in a very long time.” And more praise for the advisory roles that were scrapped. I’m curious to know more about the history of this.

- Positive reviews for the e-asTTle online assessment system. “There were problems when it went live, which made teachers reluctant to use, but resources behind it are powerful. For individual students, it has a lot of power.”

- Finally, and as further proof that New Zealand is indeed a small country, a good friend of mine attended Nelson College for Girls and actually took maths from the teacher I quoted above. “She was absolutely terrifying,” my friend told me, “because she demanded we actually understand. And I learned so much from her.” What wonderful praise to offer any teacher.

[kuranga]

Student Voice in New Zealand

“There are two type of learning [in biology], and both should be valued. There’s memorizing what cells do, and then there’s extrapolating from that to new situations. But not everyone is capable of doing this.”

Sophisticated insight from a veteran educator in New Zealand? You might think so, but this was just one of many remarkable statements generated during my conversation with students attending Nelson College for Girls. I love talking to students because they are so often unafraid to say what they believe, plainly and without fear. I hear a lot of calls for more “student voice” in education policy, but as a practical matter it’s often hard to find ways of doing that effectively. Yet if more policymakers (and educators, for that matter) spent extended time asking students for their thoughts on their own education, their own school, I have little doubt that the richness of the data used to inform education decisions would be greatly improved.

To paint a very quick picture, when I walked into this Year 12 English “extension” (or gifted) class, students were clustered in small groups, with some quietly reading, others engaged in quiet conversation among themselves, while their teacher moved throughout the room to work with students one-to-one. In other words, the girls in this class were self directing their learning and doing it extraordinarily well. At least until I sat down with a group of them and started asking questions.

When I asked them whether they liked this format of instruction, a fascinating debate broke out among them.  Nearly all of them agreed that they liked this approach -- but with caveats. “I love English and Ms Schuyl is amazing,” one said, “but this doesn’t work for me with maths. I don’t do anything.” Another student (sitting from across the room) piped up, “and not all classes are extension. In others, let’s get real -- kids won’t do the work.” A third student observed, “it’s really all or nothing, if you’re highly motivated this is great, but others will use it as excuse to do nothing. That happens in my maths class all the time.”

After watching them debate this point for a few minutes, I asked them what they thought about NCEA exams. Gasoline, meet fire. “NZQA is so bad, it’s like a running joke,” said one student. Why is that? “Last year, for level 1 [in English], you could memorize your essay because you knew what the questions would be. Literally everyone did that.” Everyone? “Well, except for [student X], who’s a genius. The rest of us just memorized exactly what we were going to write -- the questions were completely predictable.” Apparently my horror was visible on my face, because another student quickly added, “look, we all know we shouldn’t do that, and we won’t be able to get away with that for level twos.”

Sticking with NCEAs, I asked whether they perceived any difference in the rigor demanded by internal versus external assessment. Again, I received incredibly candid and nuanced responses. “It’s very hard to be fair [on internals,” said one student. “We see examples from other schools and they’re just not good. But, overall I like [internal assessment], because there’s not as much pressure.” Said another: “Teachers are going to form emotional connections with their students. They will be attempted to spoon feed. That’s a failing everywhere.” Another: “The school teaches us how to deal with exams -- not sure all schools do.” Yet another: “NCEA rewards rote learning. The scholarship exams are much better, much more on the spot.” (Side note for non-Kiwis: approximately 3% of students who achieve NCEA level 3 achieve “scholarship” which entitled them to funding for tertiary education, sort of like the US National Merit Scholarship.)

As I’ve found when talking to educators, students who attended school abroad provided interesting and unique perspective as well. One girl who attended school in a rural state in the US said, “not much was happening there” but then added, “everything counts in the US. Your attendance counts toward your grade -- we don’t do that here.” (Not sure if she meant at Nelson College for Girls or New Zealand generally.) The same student contrasted her experience studying biology: in the US, “the teacher went over and over structure,” but here in New Zealand, “our teacher expects us to learn how to apply what we know.” (Sigh.)

Student voice: challenging, thought provoking, and oh so refreshing.

[kuranga]

Vergara III - Is this case like the school funding cases?

Vergara, I just can’t quit you. This morning, my friend Kevin Carey published a thoughtful piece suggesting that yesterday’s decision represents an evolutionary step in the history of education litigation -- and he sounds a cautionary note about the “inherently problematic” nature of resolving important education issues in the courts. While I think that may be true as a historical matter, I think Carey’s argument fails to capture some important legal distinctions between Vergara and the “inadequate school funding” cases that come before it.

There are two unique aspects to education funding cases that push them toward complicated judicial entanglement with the public school system. The first is that they involve a question of positive action by the state, or what I might call an “enough of” question: Is [State X] doing enough to provide an adequate education to all of its minor children? The question of what constitutes “enough” then splits into two subquestions: what activities should State X be doing to provide the education -- very much a question a policy question -- and what level of funding is necessary to ensure those activities take place?

Second, assuming you can even identify reasonable answers to all those questions, there is no temporal limitation on them. Thus, while it may be true today that State X is adequately funding its education system, that may change if State X decides it wants to do something different in the future.

A complicated question involving thorny policy choices with no time-limiting principle is a recipe for messy judicial entanglement. This is why, as Carey notes, New Jersey is up to its 22nd (!) iteration of its own major education-funding litigation. And California had its own version (the Williams case) a few years ago that resulted in a legislative compromise, although whether it’s improving education outcomes is anyone’s guess. Also worth noting that California’s prison-health care system is operating under federal judicial oversight under basically the same logic, because California prisons are literally killing inmates due to shoddy healthcare practices. 

In any event, my point is that neither of the conditions that make education funding lawsuits problematic, from a judicial entanglement perspective, are present in Vergara. The legal question is not whether the State of California is doing “enough of” anything, but rather, whether what California is doing pursuant to its teacher-tenure laws violates the constitutional rights of California students, particularly poor or minority students. If they are, then the courts will strike down the statutes -- full stop. There’s no threat of ongoing judicial involvement in the process. Of course, the state legislature may then draft new teacher-tenure statutes, and those statutes may be later be challenged, but that’s fine. That’s how the process is supposed to work, actually, provided you believe in judicial review.

If you want more appropriate litigation to analogize to Vergara, you might look to the wave of recently enacted state statutes to prevent “voter fraud.” There is a bevy of lawsuits challenging these laws  under the theory that, while they are facially neutral, their effect as applied deprives particular citizens -- particularly poor and minority citizens -- from the opportunity to vote. That is a question of fact that courts will take evidence on, and then resolve as a matter of law. But guess what the courts won’t do? They won’t offer some alternative policy to combat the alleged problem of voter fraud, because that’s not what courts do. Progressives who oppose these pernicious voter-fraud statutes -- and I think they are beyond contempt -- might want to think about that before demanding something different from Judge Treu here.