Finland - How to form a reform

I had the chance to talk with a few of the people who created the modern education system in Finland, and they were gracious enough to share their experience and insights. I thought of looking deeper into the history of that educational reform, and write a book. I may do that yet. In the mean time, here are some thoughts. Some of the thoughts are taken from my conversations with Dr. Jaakko Itälä, Prof. Erkki Niskanen and Anneli Rusanen. Some other thoughts came from what I see around me. No warranty is implied.

A few steps:

Organize

There must be a wide acceptance of the fact that there needs to be a reform, and then the widest possible acceptance of the specifics. On the grassroots level, there is no need to convince people is most countries that there is an urgent need for a reform. The problem is that often education is not the place where power is acquired or displayed, so politicians are not sure of the need for reform. One way to bring the message from the masses to the leaders is to create a citizens organization - a voluntary association - dedicated to education. This association should not be closely affiliated with a particular political party, to avoid becoming a target for attacks. It should be a society of active reformers, affiliated with universities and relevant institutions. It can't hurt much if the association has in it insiders in many political parties.

Get the support of state-level politicians

The association should approach the parliament - one parliament member at a time, and get their support. Again, it is important to avoid partisanship, and to gain the support of parliamentarians from all parties, otherwise, the issue of education becomes a point of contention.

Get the support of local governments

Local governments - municipalities and such - are a key player in education. They are closer to the grassroots and feel the needs more directly. I.e., they know many of the voters personally and are more directly accountable than the state-level politicians. The issue of education being dear to many voters, elected officials such as mayors stand to benefit: The voters are happy with the improvement in education, and they are happy with the rise in real-estate value that comes with it. A local investment or other action by the local governments can create an immediate impact visible to their public, whereas a national action takes more time to show. Also, the local officials usually live locally, so any improvement in the education system will directly affect their own children and grandchildren, which is a very positive motivation. Most directly important, though, is the fact that to get anything done in the field of education, one needs either the active or passive support of the municipality. Building a school, splitting a school, redistributing students among schools, etc - all such efforts can fizzle out if the local government officials have a reason to object. The same efforts can be pushed to success thanks to the participation - and sometimes leadership - of these officials.

Build from the bottom up

The reformers and experts in the association can plan the types of schools and school activities the reform envisions. This can be combined with a public discussion, which itself will further the dynamic towards reform.

Create and run experimental schools according to those plans. Starting with a few schools in a few localities and building up the numbers. Creating a reality with which the national government will have to catch up.

Build from the top down

Plan and create the administrative and legal infrastructure for the reformed system, with a holistic approach - building each part as an aspect of the whole, and not as an independent issue: Curriculum setting; Financing; Testing and measurement; Teacher Education; Types of schools; Connection between K12 and higher education; Adult education and training; Research; Policy making. Nobody can expect to create such a complex system right the first time, but with iterative effort - there is a chance of creating a viable system. Since the system is by now formally defined, data about its current status is available through the Finnish education ministry.

Keep all stakeholders interested

Build a healthy balance of responsibility and authority.

The state is responsible for the long term educational health of the population, for a certain level of equality, for the future national economic strength etc. The state should have a say about what and how to teach. Maybe by creating a core curriculum, and guiding the education system as a whole.

Municipalities and local governments are responsible to their constituents for similar tasks, but on a smaller scale, and usually a shorter scope of time. While the state can plan for s short eternity, a municipality is often interested just in one or two decades. Local government need to have some control over the type of professional training available within their area. State financing of the municipality can be a tool for providing some independence to the municipality, as well as a tool for equalizing opportunities within the nation, by providing more financing to weaker localities.

Schools have a responsibility to the students and parents. Schools should have some choice in what and how to teach.

Individual teachers have a responsibility to the students. The teachers should be able to decide how to teach, and what to emphasize.

And wouldn't it be nice if the students considered themselves as responsible stakeholders rather than passive denizens (or victims) of the system? This can be promoted by giving the students some choice about what and when to study.

This is layered approach, distributing authority among all parties. This way, instead of concentrating on survival and not being noticed, everybody's personal sense of responsibility and creativity can become dominant. Sounds like a good thing.

Maintain

Society is a living creature, and so is every single aspect of society, such as education. If we create a perfect system and let it stay the same, soon enough society will change, and the system will be less and less perfect for the changing society. Even worse, a social system left alone doesn't really stay the same; it goes its own way according to market forces and political forces, which have very little to do with the goals of the system. So, as far as the goals are concerned, left to its own devices, the system will deteriorate.
The goal is to create a self-correcting system, able to cope with all possible ways it may tend to deteriorate. A formal system that predictably deals with all unpredictable scenarios is a contradiction in terms. But an adapting system with some flexibility may do the trick.
A few mechanisms can work together:

• Revision of the curriculum once in a while - maybe once a decade - can help keep up with a fast changing world and prevent the education system concentrating on the obsolete
• Paths for knowledge transfer from the ground up can ensure the policymakers aren't becoming too theoretical and disconnected from reality


• Paths for knowledge transfer from the top to the field can ensure the teachers are up to date with the right curriculum and best practices


• An active lookout for new ideas inside the system, in academia, and in other countries can decrease the chance of stagnation


• Ongoing research into subject matters, teaching methods and social trends can be used to update teachers education and the system in general. This can be used to check some of the new ideas found by the lookout mentioned above, and avoid a Brownian motion of random changes based on whims rather than understanding


• The governing laws and the professional culture should ensure that authority won't drift towards the center, which is a danger if the source of finance remains at the national level

The above is a good first step. Now all you need to do is work very hard for a generation or two, and you get a working national education system.

Measurement - In Practice

To remain within the consensus, I will concentrate for now on measuring the progress of the education system, and not of individual students. How do we measure our progress towards the goals we set to ourselves?

Short answer:
I don't know.

Longer answer:
International tests are a good start. For the simple goals, anyway.
Literacy: PIRLS - Progress in International Reading Literacy Study - attempts to create standard measurements relevant to the literacy goal set in the previous post. It should be expanded into testing ability to write, speak and listen. It is no accident that the test concentrates on reading - it is much easier to test reading: It is possible to use multiple choice questions, which lends themselves better to data processing. Testing the ability to listen and understand can also be done with multiple choices, but it's more difficult logistically: Recordings need to be distributed; placing the player in front of a whole class of students being tested, is tricky, since students close to the player hear it differently than those far from the player. So maybe a personal player for each student? Need more thought and experimentation (remember Research?) Testing ability to write and speak is even more difficult: How do we design a test that can objectively grade the quality of writing and speaking? How do we test the quality of communication? See my Short answer above.

Second Language: We may use an adapted version of the same PIRLS derivative as the one used for mother-tongue literacy. Possibly with a different mix of contexts - business, science, culture, etc. Possibly with more lenience for certain speaking and writing mistakes. Needs even more thought and experimentation.

Numeracy: TIMMS - Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study - attempts to create standard measurements relevant to the numeracy goal set in the previous post. It can be adapted to test the specific details of the Foundation Layer Goal of Numeracy as defined before. At the level of detail used to discuss this goal so far, measurement seems relatively easy.

Measuring progress relating to other goals will be discussed when these goals become clearer.
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Goals - Foundation Layer

All goals are not created equal. Some are closer to a consensus, and some are closer to a religious war. Some are are perceived as crucial, and some as nice-to-have. Some are close to universal interest, some are strictly personal. This post will try to remain in one corner of the goal-space for education: Educational goals that are as close as possible to the consensus, crucial and universal. Hence, I will say very little about values, since that would kick me away from consensus, as values differ tremendously between my two readers.

What do we want the graduate to be like, for the benefit of the graduate and of society?

Literacy is a safe goal. Every graduate should be able to speak, listen, read and write well - at least in their native language. This is a starting point for many other potential goals of culture, social participation, economic success potential, etc. Ok, we covered mother tongue. What about a second language? Is it important for the 1 billion speakers of Mandarin Chinese to be literate another language? Is it important for native English speakers, who represent about a third of the world's economy, to be literate in another language? It seems that the Chinese have decided that it's to their economic advantage to have access to the current economic powers - who speak English. It may take some more time for English speakers to get used to the idea that the Chinese growing market and world power is a good reason to have some level of literacy in their most common languages, with a similar consideration being relevant to Spanish, Portuguese or Russian as an interesting language for native English speakers. Native speakers of smaller languages, such as Finnish, already take it as self-evident that it is to their advantage to venture outside their own language. A Second Language is close enough to the consensus. Or should be.
A note about the study of any language in this context: The emphasis should be on developing communication skills; grammar should take only a secondary position. The goal is to be able to use the language, and it is of less use to the graduates if they can list the types of verbs.

Numeracy, is another type of literacy, which is a foundation for many directions the graduate may take in life. We can remain within a very basic set of abilities when we define the foundation goal: Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division. In my own work, I occasionally use much higher levels of mathematics, and I may alienate many of my friends writing this paragraph. But the great majority of the people I know, after finishing their studies, never had to find a solution to a quadratic equation, a derivative, an integral, a sine or the like. Neither did they ever need to classify a triangle nor check if two triangles are congruent. They all studied how to do it, but most of them can't do any of the above to save their lives. At the same time, many of them have a hard time balancing their checkbooks, which only requires the ability to add and subtract. How about putting some less time into teaching everybody all the higher aspects of mathematics, at least until we know how to teach everybody how to add and subtract? We can add to the basics also percentage calculations, which are indeed used often by many people (E.g., Sale: 20% off) And also some calculations repeated over time, which will demystify the behavior of the bank balance (add/subtract over time) and the behavior of the mortgage (subtract/multiply over time). I personally enjoy math sometimes, but do we really have to inflict it on everybody who doesn't? Oh dear. I can feel the consensus slipping away. I'll tell you what: The higher levels of mathematics don't need to be abandoned. We can even expand on them if we feel it is necessary. But we can do that in the context of other layer of goals, and keep the foundation layer with the minimum that is necessary for every graduate to lead a modern life.

There are many other worthy issues, and each of them has a good reason not to be part of the Foundation Layer. Some are:

• Science and scientific thinking. That's a good goal, and it is close to the consensus - at least in the west - but it is not as clear as literacy and numeracy. What sciences? Physics? Sociology? How much detail?
  It would take some discussion



• Morality, Humanism, Religion, Ideology, and other values. All these are too far from the consensus to be part of the foundation



• Coping with new realities: Ubiquitous computers and communication, the avalanche of information and pseudo-information, fast changes and lack of certainty, decline of authority, etc. These need further discussion, exactly because they are new and thinking about them is relatively new



• Public speaking, debating, presenting, and other aspects of salesmanship. It would take some effort to find room for these in the narrow confines of the consensus, but it may be worth the effort

So for the most basic foundation layer of Goals, we remain with Literacy, possibly a second language, and basic numeracy. Let's call it a day.

Some old ideas

Without lapsing into a bad case of nostalgia, we can look at some old practices and learn from them. Even if we don't think we should or could use them now and in the near future.

60 years ago my mother was growing up in Romania. Many of her teachers were old spinsters. No family or other major interests to distract them from teaching. She says it showed in their level of involvement. Now, far be it from me to suggest we require or even encourage spinsterhood. But maybe there is something we can re-learn here. Maybe there are ways to encourage more teachers to consider teaching as a noble path in life, and not as an arbitrary career choice. With such an attitude, maybe teachers will be able to resist some of the frantic dispersing of energy with which modern life seduces us. Come to think of it, not only teachers - all of us can use such an approach, and concentrate on the most important things: Our family, and our Noble Cause.

80-90 years ago, my grandmother was growing up in Austria. From 5th grade to 12th grade she had the same class teacher. Having followed the kids for so long, the teacher of course knew each one of them quite well. She was able to notice when something was wrong, and could use her familiarity with the students to work it out. When I was in 7th grade, my accomplishments in school started to deteriorate. My class teacher knew me only for a few months, so she couldn't be really aware that something is changing. Nobody noticed, and my achievements continued to be less than brilliant. all the way to graduation. I am doing fine now, but clearly our path in life shouldn't be determined by neglect - even if everybody meant well and there is no blame to assign. The constancy my grandmother enjoyed seems to be a good feature for an education system. It would be good to find a way to work it into our system.

110 years ago, my great grandfather was studying to become a Rabi. Probably went to a Yeshiva (the communal memory is sketchy). He didn't become a Rabi - he decided he is not worthy of it. There is a lot to be said about the traditional methods of studying in Yeshivas. Much was written abort these methods and their advantages. I won't go into much details, but I can mention a few guiding principles: Studying with a teacher in small groups; peers studying together; arguing the issues at hand; finding relevant connections between the subject matter and current events; reopening study subjects over and over again. Social groups - mostly religions - that place an emphasis on learning have been in existence for thousands of years. Some of their methods are still alive, and we can and should learn from them.

In the middle ages (sorry - no family memory here), apprenticeship was a common method for transferring knowledge and skills. In some existing traditional societies, apprenticeship is still in wide use. In some modern professions, such as accounting, law and medicine, a form of apprenticeship - aka "internship" - is common. This practice has a serious danger of drifting into exploitation, but it also has the potential to transfer informal knowledge in a way quite impossible in modern teacher/student relationship. How do we get the benefit of such knowledge transfer without allowing abuse? It would take some work.

Throughout the ages, the well-to-do were able to get personal tutors for their kids. The well-to-do are usually pretty good at taking care of themselves. Surely there are advantages in a teacher whose full attention is given to one child. By definition, this one-on-one teacher/student ratio is very difficult to scale up to a mass education system. But the advantages are such, that it would be a shame to give up on it without a fight. There are ways to enjoy some of that 1:1 tutor:student work, some of the time.

Looking into lessons from old education methods is a good subject for a book. The above text does not attempt to provide a full analysis, but it raises the issue and looks at some of the possibilities.

I don't have a plan

The title starts with an "I". Accordingly, this post contains personal experiences and unscientific opinions.

A year and a half ago I decided I am going to do something about education; even change the education system. I started talking about it with people. Usually, the first responses were enthusiastic. Often, there came a question along the line of "so how exactly are you going to do that - what's you're plan?" I didn't have a plan. How can I have a definite plan without knowing much? All the knowledge I had was my own experience, the complaints of others, and some rumors. Some people regarded my lack of plan as an indication I am not serious about it. But I thought if I formed a plan before I learned much more about the situation, and before I made an orderly effort to define my own goals - then I would be unserious. Worse, acting on a difficult talk without preparation is a good start for an eventual failure.

So, for a long time I insisted on not having a plan, and tried my best not to form definite opinions. I started by going to Finland to meet some of the people who changed Finland's education in the 1970s. One motivation for that trip was to see in my own eyes that it is possible to "fix" an education establishment, and that humans have done it. This is an inspiration I was looking for, and keeps me hopeful. Also, they do have a plan. I spoke with Dr. Jaakko Itälä, who was a leader of the education reform movement and served as a minister of education during the reform. In the first phone conversation we had, he started laying down his action plan: How to create a movement, how to generate political and popular support, etc. When I visited him, we sat together with Prof. Erkki Niskanen, who takes the academic angle of education reform, and he had prepared a list of types of laws that need to be passed as part of the plan. They were (and are) decades ahead of me in terms of planning. Much to catch up.

I took some time to read classic books, to listen to experts and researchers, to meet activists and teachers, to teach - standing in front of real students, and to think. Of course, I could go on for years, learn more and more, and still not be sure about the way to go. It is not really for humans to know, but we can do. A good indication that I may be ripe for some action is the fact that some of my precious preconceptions haven't survived the period of learning so far - I had to abandon them. This means I learned something new, which is good. I am going to keep studying and expanding my experience, and at the same time I am going to allow myself to start develop my plan.

What Fun!

"It can't be helped"

It's a common conception that the education establishment - in any country - is too complex, large, entrenched, politicized, conservative, etc. Also, they don't have enough finance, teachers, principles, managers, public support, etc. Many of these assertions are well based, but it is important not to confuse difficulty with impossibility. The task of creating a better education system falls under "difficult", or even "formidable", but some have done it and are doing it. A few examples of success:

There are some efforts to measure education achievement. One of them is embodied in the IEA - International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. They make international assessments like TIMMS - Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Some countries, such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan (aka "Chinese Taipei") consistently do well in these studies. At the very least, this means it's possible to do well.

The OECD runs its own international test - PISA - Programme for International Student Assessment. Finland consistently performs at the top of PISA tests. With Finland, it's an even more interesting story, since the education system there hasn't always been great. A concerted effort was put into improving education, using administrative structure, finance structure, careful building of teachers' education and giving many relevant stakeholders the power to make their own decisions. In addition to success in international tests, there are some indirect indications of success. For example, in Finland there are about 10 applicants for each position in teachers education. That is both a good sign, and an assurance that the establishment can select the best. Again, this must mean it is possible to do well.

So, some countries are doing much better than others. My contention is that there is no good reason for my country - or yours - to have a poorly functioning education system. Changing a n established education system is a great task, both in terms of difficulty and in terms of value. Arthur W. Foshay - a founder of IEA - said "If custom and law define what is educationally allowable within a nation, the educational systems beyond one’s national boundaries suggest what is educationally possible." I say: "Hey, a few decades of tremendous effort, and we can do much better." It will be worth it.

The roots of the problem

We established that in general, humanity's ability to educate its young is not impressive. The discussion is of the mainstream education. There may exist a school, or even a small network of schools that actually knows how to educate kids. Some say KIPP is just that. It seems that here and there, some wonderfully charismatic and talented people were able to go well beyond what we normally allow ourselves to expect. This is a great source of inspiration, and a way to fight the assumption that the standard schooling system is all we can aspire for. Still, why is the standard so low?

In real life, that is - outside articles and blogs - answers are seldom simple and unambiguous. We can find many reasons: Kids are spoiled; Parents are weak; Teachers are unmotivated; Politicians are shortsighted; Voters have short memory; Public Servants forgot they are; and many more. One common denominator of these explanations is that they point a finger at a supposed culprit, and that the culprit is never the speaker. So it is a good way to ventilate the frustration and convert it to anger. It is not a very good way to get ahead. Also, where there are many separate reasons, it may be a good idea to look elsewhere for one or two underlying reasons. Following is a theory I find useful:

Up until 10,000 years ago - an evolutionary eye-blink - humans were organized in tribes. "Theoretical" knowledge was transferred using oral stories. Some to be retold by all tribe members, some to be retold by the apprentice storyteller of the tribe, when the old storyteller dies. Common practical know-how was transferred from parent to child, by example and by apprenticeship. Special knowledge, such as medicine, was transferred from specialist to apprentice. The whole set of knowledge was manageable and maintainable within a group of a few dozen - or a few hundred - people. Every member of the tribe could be a teacher or a tutor. Teaching was a long one-on-one affair.
In the last 10,000 years, we invented writing, which allowed the total knowledge to be retained over millennia, creating an explosion of knowledge. We started living in cities, which are much more like swarms than tribes: There is an explosion of people, knowledge specialties and know-how specialties. It has been a few hundred years since the time any one human - no matter how intelligent - could be said to have command of all of human knowledge. And I doubt Leonardo Da-Vinci was a great cook, so even he didn't quite know everything. To make life more interesting, a couple hundred years ago we had a nice industrial revolution, with the side effect of many more specialties. Now we say we are having an information revolution, and the explosion of knowledge accelerates. Now it is much less clear what profession (= knowledge domain) a child should acquire, so we try to give them a taste of everything. Very few people are in charge of teaching all the children, so instead of a one-on-one or one-on-few teacher/student ratio, we have a 1/20 or 1/40.
At the same 10,000 years, how much have humans evolved?
Reading early human scripts from the past 5,000 years - in Sumerian, Sanskrit, Greek, Chinese, Hebrew, etc. - the people it described seem just like 21st century people. So, 5000 years with no perceivable change. I would bet there was not much change in the previous few thousand years either.

So, 10,000 years; dramatic change in society; dramatic change in knowledge; no visible change is us. We can expect some problems here. All the individual problems listed at the beginning of this post can be seen as reflections of the basic issue of explosive development we haven't caught up with.

This theory doesn't indicate a clear path to a solution, but it is useful in that it gives a framework for thinking about the problem without accusing each other. This way we can work together towards catching up, without worrying about blame.
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The State Of The Art of Education - 2009

The State Of The Art is Appalling.

There are many ways to argue about the quality of education, and I am so terribly confident about the above claim, that I will not need to talk about rampant illiteracy in third world countries, about functional illiteracy in first world countries, about embarrassing international test scores, etc.

Let's just Look at a single aspect of the state of the art in the west: Good Teaching

Exhibit 1: In 1996, Sanders and Rivers showed that a teacher's quality has a critical effect on the performance of a student. This can be seen rather dramatically in the following image:

It is claimed, and widely quoted and accepted, that if we take an 8 year-old student with 50th percentile performance, and give them a fairly good teacher (top 20% - not necessarily a star), then in 3 years the student can be expected to perform at the 90th percentile. If, however, we take the same student and give them a fairly poor (bottom 20% - not necessarily a terrible teacher), then in 3 years the student can be expected to perform at the 37th percentile. So, the quality of a teacher - however it may be defined - has a significant effect on the performance of students.
Not very surprising.

Exhibit 2: This (2009) February, Bill Gates gave a talk at TED, and dedicated most of it (starting at timestamp 08:00) to the question "How do you make a teacher great?", and to the fact that we don't know the answer. Maybe some people say they do know, and maybe they really do, but apparently we don't all know. At least Gates - who showed that he has the capacity to do a thing or two - says he doesn't quite know the answer to the question.

Taking these facts together: that the quality of the teacher has a critical effect on the students' performance, and that we don't know how to produce quality teachers, together with the fact that performance is a common goal for education - leads to an unhappy conclusion: As of 2009, humanity's know-how is missing a major building block of education.

Some drama if you allow me: Hundreds of years after the establishment of modern schooling; Thousands of years after the invention of writing and of the city-civilization, which requires schooling, we still don't know how to do it well.
Surprising, and not in a nice way.

In this blog, over the next few months, I will look at ways to ensure a very different future post of "The State Of The Art of Education - 2049". (What, anybody expected a quick fix?)

Bare Necessities - A summary

Only one thing is worse than stating the obvious. It's summarizing the obvious. So here it is:

Educating - whether a single child or the masses - is a complex task. Without some method, it will be madness.

• Know where you are going - Goals
  
• Without knowing where you are going, you are not very likely to get there. In the case of an education system: What do we want our graduates to know, to be able to do, to tend to do, to have done, etc.


• These goals, by nature, are not constant. The goals change in time as society change; the goals vary according to the segment of society, etc.
  This is why "where we are going" - our goals - must be re-evaluated occasionally


• It's an ongoing process


• Know where you are - Measurement


• Without knowing the starting point, it's unlikely you will go in a direction that will lead us closer to our goal. But this is just at the first instance: As soon as we do anything - make any change in the whole education system, or even just teach one class a single subject - we are in a different place. We need to check where we are now, and update our direction.


• Even the way we measure the state of our education system may change from time to time. For example, if we add a goal of creativity, we need to be able to measure something completely new and different than measuring knowledge


• This is also an ongoing process


• Know what you are doing - Research


• In education, we don't have a recipe for getting from here to there for any conceivable here and there. We constantly find ourselves with new student, new teachers, new material to teach, new targets imposed by politicians and/or international testing, new events, new knowledge, new fashions... We always try to find our way in not-completely-charted waters


• Those of us who don't have reliable access to divine intuition, need some kind of method. A systematic way to devise a possible course of action, try it, see what happens, and learn from it. This way, if we are successful, we can repeat the success, and if we are not successful, we can try to see what went wrong, modify our action, and try again. This is can be used as a crude description of Applied Research


• Educational research must also be an ongoing process, since it keeps trying to bring us from our ever-changing current state to our occasionally-changing goals

Looking at the three imperatives above, it is clear that they are quite universal. Not just education, but any non-trivial endeavor can be said to based on these guidelines: Know where you are, where you are going, and what you are doing to get from her to there.

Bare Necessities?? Research

Is research a basic necessity for improving the education system? Sadly, it is an absolute requirement. Here is why it's necessary, and why it's sad.

Presented with any set of circumstances and a small goal to achieve we need to know what to do to get from here to there. For example, having a group of 30 first-grade students, with varied skills, tendencies and knowledge, and wishing to teach them reading and writing at a specified level, with certain limitations (budget) - what type of teacher(s), materials, methods etc. do we need? OK, one might say we already know how to do that - having been doing that for 5000 years or so, and this is a good subject for a separate posting. So, how about teaching the same kids how to keep the environment in mind - a much newer concern? Certainly we don't know exactly how to do it well. We would need to devise a method, try it, check our success, improve the method, and try again with a different group, etc. That's close to the definition of research.

It would have been very nice to have a cookbook, with a very good index, telling us exactly what to do in any set of circumstances: Which students, teachers, time limitation, budget, society, subject, required level, ... It would be a pretty thick cookbook. Would take a lot of research to write it, too.

Why "Sadly?", because research can't be done using computers or mice. We have to work with real children - at least partly. Such research means trying new methods, new materials, etc. Doing something new means the occasional failure is inevitable. That's why it is called "Trial and Error." Let's face it: Research has a side effect of Errors, which means Damage. If we try a new method of teaching first graders the ABC, it could happen that we end up after 6-12 month with a group of kids who don't read and write well. Then we would need to re-teach them using a different method, possibly using rarer resources, such as expert teachers. Eventually, the kids will all read and write properly. So the damage will usually be limited to wasted time and temporary confusion.

So, it is sad, and the instant response we can expect from many parents would be along the lines of "that's fine, as long as you don't try anything with my kid." We all want the tried and sure for ourselves and our own kids. I won't bore the reader with a speech about the common good, but I would suggest that there is no tried and sure way in education. I would further suggest that the same reader is already deeply engaged in trial and error with their kids. I know I am: When my kid wants chocolate before dinner, what should I do? Suppose I decide to say No. How should I say No? I try saying it one way and get a tantrum. Great, this is definitely not what I was hoping for, so it definitely qualifies as a trial and error. To make things even more interesting, I now need to decide what to do about the tantrum, what to do about the chocolate, and what to do the next time he asks for chocolate before dinner. I will make many trials, and many errors. The chocolate quagmire happens in the most simple settings possible: One child, one-on-one educator/student ratio, very familiar settings, etc. And still I can't always get it right. How can I expect professional educators to always get it right without error? But I can expect them to do it mindfully: plan ahead, always measuring the results, always learn from the result and distribute the knowledge, always fix any damage that may have occurred. Planning, measuring, learning and distributing knowledge taken together, are also a good definition of research.

Having written this post, I am now even more comfortable with the concept of Research Based Education as an imperative, if we want education to improve, and even if we just want it to keep up with a changing world.
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Bare Necessities: Measurement

Remaining within the obvious, this post is concerned with measuring the state of the whole system of education against its goals. I will leave the issue of measuring the progress of individuals to a later stage, when I am happier tackling disputable issues.

"You Can't Manage What You Don't Measure" - a quote attributed to Peter Drucker, who had a wonderful ability to present ideas of great importance and show how obviously true they are.

Another statement that should be evident is that if you want to move from here to there, you need to steer yourself from here to there. This is simple enough when "here" is the living room and "there" is the kitchen; but when "here" is the state of the education system in your country, and "there" is your inevitably complex goals, then the "steering" becomes a full blown case of Management. With education, we need to manage our progress in relation to our lofty goals, to how we expect future society to look like, to what society sees as valuable, to what the teachers want, to what the students want, to what technology enables, economy, geography, health... and this is a very partial list which doesn't even take into account that many of these are moving targets: Our goals can - and must - change as society changes. Our future expectations and present preoccupations change. We need to account for politics and fashion, and we need to mitigate their erratic impact. So, quite a few balls to keep our eyes on - not a trivial management challenge. Does anybody think it can be done without keeping track, I.e., Measurement?

So, we need to measure the education system's state order to improve it - whatever the direction of improvement we seek. We also need to measure relevant aspects of the environment in which the education system is functioning - society at large. How do we measure complex internal and external states? How do we quantify that which is most quantification-resistant, that is - human? How do we reach agreement about which methods of measurement are reliable or even relevant? I will think about it another time.

Scope: Education for whom?

Here I won't even try to be objective: These are my own preferences.

I am interested in the main-stream mass of K12 students. Aka "Kids."

Age group: I have a 7.5 year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son. This explains my preoccupation with K12 education: Kindergarten to 12th grade.

Countries: The West, and also West wannabees. I know too little about the rest.

Special needs? No. There are many subgroups with their own needs and their own existing - usually partial - solutions.

• The specially gifted have venues to develop their special gifts
• Those with learning disorders have a whole industry catering to them
• The economically privileged will have their schools, no matter what the establishment says
• The economically underprivileged have many organizations trying to help them
• All other specific groups may have or may not have some targeted solutions

This blog is concerned mostly with those with regular needs. I believe that clearing the common ground and building something useful on that ground, will serve almost everybody. Once we have the main building, we can tailor custom additions for the special needs.

So, regular kids with regular needs.

A group worthy of a good effort.

Bare Necessities: Goals

Pretty basic: In order to get what we want from Education, we need to know what we want. We need to have a goal or a set of goals. If we don't have well-understood goals, we are not likely to ever approach them. Even if by chance we reached a worthy goal, we wouldn't know it, so we wouldn't be any less frustrated.

A few nagging questions:
What are the goals of Education where your kids study?
Is it clear if values are a goal? Which values? Is there a consensus regarding these values? It's unlikely the answer is Yes to all.

Imparting knowledge is probably part of any Educational methodology's. What knowledge is important for your kids to have 5-15-30 years into the future? Is it the same knowledge that was important for you 5-15-30 years into the past?
Same about skills.

How about just keeping the kids out of harm's way? I am often taken aback by indication from fellow parents that they would settle for institutionalized babysitting. We can get more than that out of 13 years.

Also featured: Ability to learn, Creating the Tendency to learn, indoctrination into society, socialization, and quite a few other possible sub-goals best expressed in specialized jargon.

We may want all of the above, and maybe we can even get all of the above one way or another. But first we must state the goals clearly to ourselves. Then maybe we can start building the education framework to approach them.

A well thought-out analysis of such goals in the terms of "the desired graduate" can be found in Gavriel Salomon's 2001 book: Technology and education in the age of information.


Every society and every parent may have different ideas about the worthiest goals. The nightmarish danger is that without discussing what we want, we would default into a low common denominator.
But this can't really happen, can it?

About K12 Education

For 40 years - since I started K12 - I've had my reservations about what's called Education.

For 27 years - since I finished K12 - I have been disgusted with what passes for Education.

For 8 years - since before my daughter was born - I have been worried about the state of Education.

A year ago I started doing something about it.

Just now I started a blog.

Things are picking up!