There are certain phrases that make me cringe as soon as I hear them, a visceral response to advanced calculations my sub-conscious must be doing in there somewhere.

A few off the top of my head:

‘Let’s agree to disagree‘  (on important matters this means ‘You have a point I can’t refute,  so let’s appear equal on the issue’.  Of course if it’s whether Thai food or Korean Barbecue is better it takes on a different meaning altogether–that this disagreement is trivial and not worth further discussion).

‘Extended Warrantee‘  (Um, it just always seems to translate to me losing more money and time).  This is where salespeople make their biggest commission, which may be why they are so concerned that your new electronic device does not cause you grief by breaking down in the next three years.

‘No Child Left Behind‘.  Somehow I felt right off the bat that this would mean most children left behind, or ‘behind’ would be redefined to mean ‘ahead’, so that bureaucrats could claim it worked.  I can’t explain how I knew, but I wished at the time it were a stock I could bet against.  Right now I’d be up there with Gates and Buffett.

‘Research-Based‘  Every time I hear the phrase ‘research-based’ in a teachers’ meeting,  I hear ‘this worked in a land far far away under lab conditions that have nothing to do with your situation but help us sell educational books and give a false air of legitimacy’.  It’s cynical, I know, but I am stereotyping my experience with the phrase and the disparity between the promised research and the visible results.

It is worth noting that research with students (sociological) is not a hard science like physics.  A Hydrogen Atom will have the same amount of electrons whether it is in Antarctica or Chicago.  Students will not act the same in all classes in all schools.

Here’s the thing:  I’m all for research, but this phrase is often used in too vague a manner.  True research tries to prove itself wrong by testing it in various environments with all variables considered, or as many as possible, and to use other explanations to challenge the results, not just the ones desired.  It often seems to be used in teachers’ meetings so that the ensuing information will not get challenged.  By broad definition, everything is research-based, so specifics must be given to make it meaningful.  Reminds me of the old ’4 out of 5 dentists surveyed’  and ‘scientifically proven’ in commercials.  Out of context these things are only meant to impress.

All I’m advocating here is that if you hear the phrase ‘research-based’ in a context that leaves you doubtful, challenge the research:

‘What research was done where and to what extent?’  for starters.

‘Were alternative explanations offered for the results?  Did the researchers try to disprove their findings?’

Okay, Craig, we are not children, we are teachers who know how to challenge ideas.  Okay, but I think in twenty years of meetings and professional developments I never heard the term ‘research-based’ challenged once by other staff.   So I encourage you to trust your own judgment and challenge ideas whether they are mine, someone else’s or your own.

In a meeting at my last High School I had to (once again) leave my students for an in-service on how the gap between students writing at 6th Grade Level and meeting the standards in their 10th Grade classes could be achieved.  For those of you who understand this is logically impossible you may be excused.  Of course this was research-based information. I foolishly pointed out that this was logically impossible, and when the presenter replied that it wasn’t, informed all of the good news:  We can now eliminate 7th, 8th and 9th Grade–they are unnecessary because when students get to the 10th Grade the gap can be closed with these techniques, saving us all a bunch of time and money.

Of course the presenter is not here to defend himself, so you’ll have to take my word for it that he had no real counter-argument, but was unused to being challenged.  In matters that matter to our students, let’s challenge the specifics of ‘research-based’ and agree we must disagree until the side with the most or only merit succeeds.

(This post will concentrate on the humanities.  For the same ideas on the theme concerning math, though related, I will limit myself to once again calling attention to Jaime Escalante, who turned ‘poor’ Garfield High School into one of the top math schools in the nation–with very little money.  He got students to  1.value education and therefore   2. work hard.   These methods have fallen out of favor).

If you attempt to achieve a true result from a false premise you will almost literally bang your head against the wall.

If you were to watch Tiger Woods make an incredible shot (I know, I’m short on analogies, but sports are visual and not everyone knows Maradona) and conclude, ‘Hey, he made that shot because he has expensive golf clubs’, you would go out and get yourself some first rate golf clubs and proceed to make your lousy shots with them.  Even then, while not being the impetus behind the skilled shot, they help a bit–unlike books, which if readable offer no advantage intellectually by having a new cover.

If you look at the best educated people and think ‘Wow, they went to shiny new schools, THAT’S why they’re well- educated’ then you pour billions of dollars into shiny new classrooms (and, let’s say, shiny new techniques) (While, of course, ignoring the lives of people like Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Malcolm X, and hundreds of thousands of significant less-luminous others who got educated with little money).

That’s why whenever I see money poured into a school under the premise that it takes a lot of money to get educated or that it is the key to a ‘first-rate’ education I pad my walls.

The foundation of a solid education is a high reading level.  Really, it’s that simple.  Yes there are other factors, but as I tried to reason with the English department at my school a few years ago:

1.  You never see a low-achieving school with overall high reading levels

2.  You never see a high-achieving school with low reading levels.

Where should your emphasis be?

What do you need to attain high reading levels?

1.  Books

2.  Reading them, preferably from a very early age.

3.  A huge working vocabulary.  This will stem easily from the first two steps here if done right.

Books are anywhere from free (public library or school library) to .25 cents at the nearest used bookstore for access to the greatest minds the world has ever known.

Success in school is directly tied to reading levels, not money.

It does not take a lot of money to attain a high reading level.   Books are cheap.

You can’t pour money on someone’s head and make them educated.

As long as schools think that money is the key to education they will fail, because they are operating under the wrong premise.

The key to education is not money, but value.

Put a billion dollars into a low-achieving school and you might as well flush it if you don’t understand why it is low-achieving (if victim is anywhere in your thesis go ahead and flush it).

To spend your time reading to your children from a young age (and which is the greatest predictor of academic success, NOT how rich you are) you need to value that.

I did not grow up rich.  I guess lower middle class when it came to income.  I did have access to a ‘first-rate’ education which I will explain later.

There was one area where my mother never put any restraints:  how many books I could get at the book fair at school every year.  She did not have a lot of money;  she just chose to use it for books.  That’s called value.  Trips to the library.

If you want to see a school improve follow these steps:

1.  Arrange it that there is no disruption in classrooms

2.  Concentrate on High Reading Levels

3.  Realize that it is value, not money, that leads to a solid education.

This takes time.  It may take 12 years, to start with kindergarden and see the progress, because reading at high levels is difficult if you haven’t had the foundation.  You will have to work harder, unpopular as that may sound.  I guarantee no state that has won the race to the top can substitute anything for high reading levels and hard work.

The concepts are very simple.  They are being unnecessarily complicated.  Books.  Studying.  Hard work.

It’s that easy.

When thinking of writing this article, I was thinking that posterity would find group work one of the most over-rated concepts to be emphasized in education this last decade or two.  But then I realized I didn’t have to wait for posterity.  After 20 years in the biz, I could trust my empirical observations.  Which is something I recommend to all teachers:  if there is a disconnect between your experience and what ideas are handed to you from on high, trust what is in front of your eyes.  That is why my discipline method is so successful:  it is based on what really works, not what should or what I want to work.

Group work has been emphasized in classes with that fanatic insistence in education circles which approaches religiosity, as if by not having your students in groups at all times and opportunities you are committing a sin.   If you put your students in groups when the administrator shows up for evaluation, you are on the right track ( as well as having your agenda on the board and not ever reading from a textbook or encouraging good grammar–textbooks are only invented so you can prove what a good teacher you are by not using it, and grammar is not important as long as students get the idea across–although you can’t get an idea across without grammar, something legions of educators have overlooked).  Lecturing your students, though you might have years of interesting experience and fascinating connections and knowledge to relate,  also makes you a dud in the modern educational community.

Yep, group work has been the fad for years, while it’s reciprocal has gone under-appreciated: individual work with complete silence.

I write about this today because I happen to have had an opportunity to be in a very quiet place studying in a big, noisy city, and so unaccustomed to this perfect silence was I that I realized its rarity, especially having taught in inner-city schools for years, where the absolute silence requisite for intense concentration seems hardly a valued commodity, much less a reality.  Even when my classrooms are silent there is nearly always some noise coming from the halls, or from some machine making noise on campus, or an important non-academic announcement about a pep rally, or an assembly about your rights or another popular social issue ( some schools, I’ve suggested, should have as their mission statement “Anything but Academics!”)

But here, in the midst of a profound silence, I realize how difficult it is to think deeply, to really concentrate, without really profound, nearly perfect quiet over a sustained period of time.  I’m in the midst of poring through a music production manual, and the technical jargon taxes my reading comprehension limits, and hey, I’m no dummy, I’ve got a lot of reading experience, in the millions of pages, and yet–were it not perfectly quiet, without disruption or distraction, I wouldn’t have a chance at getting this stuff.

How much less students with less than marvelous reading comprehension skills and only burgeoning skills of prolonged concentration will be able to truly grasp the advanced comprehension necessary to decode more advanced works without plenty of opportunity in a quiet environment?  Earth to modern education, do you read me?  This takes quiet and sustained effort.

And so little do our students get an opportunity to enjoy this delicious quiet.  First, because of classroom disruptions and ineffective school discipline (which I have solved with my book for those looking for solutions– classroom disruption is hardly as inevitable as is widely held to be true these days), and second because of noise in the environment.

I noticed years ago, that when there was not even a bit of noise in the classroom, I mean perfect silence, you could tangibly feel the concentration ( and therefore intelligence!) of the entire class increase.  But with even a little distraction, that atmosphere was ruined.  If you have felt the same, trust yourself, it is true;  students need more perfectly uninterrupted quiet classroom time to have a fighting chance to garner enough concentration to achieve advanced levels of thinking.

I’m not saying group work is not ever valuable, only that it is greatly overrated.  It is useful as a tool applied when students are self-controlled and at the level of independent behavior and thinking where the exchange of ideas is meaningful.  But it is at the end of the line, not the beginning.  In other words, it is developmentally the last step that should be used in instruction, not, as commonly done, used as a knee-jerk method to employ at every available opporunity.  It is a tool best used after long periods of concentration and independent thinking have been developed, not as a means to create  this kind of thinking.

Those of us subjected to this constant pressure to use group work when students are not developmentally ready for it have witnessed at best, the lack of any meaningful dialogue going on, at worst, an excuse to blab or gossip, and every time-wasting variation in-between.

If you told me my child were to spend vast amounts of time independently concentrating on advanced ideas during their secondary school career, or vast amounts of time in groups discussing things, I know which I think would be the more productive.  I would want them to have the opportunity to think for prolonged periods of time in a concentrated atmosphere, because social interaction, even concerning academic ideas, is much easier to come by.  Geez, you can and should do it at lunch.

So my point here is a perfectly quiet classroom is a tremendously valuable and underrated tool for academic development, and that it should be emphasized more than group work, and teachers should be praised and encouraged to have classrooms which provide opportunity for students to enjoy this priceless and ever rarer commodity.

I do not picture Lincoln writing the Gettysburg Address or Einstein working out the Theory of Relatativity with noise around them (to be fair, I think Alby worked out some of his theory while watching the kiddies at home, but his mind surely did not develop in the midst of chaotic noise).  When you witness your students really making progress, trust your own instincts as to what made that happen, not some theory du jour from high above that has been shoved down your throat.  My experience of group work has been that students mostly aimlessly blab or turn it into social time or don’t have enough intellectual ammunition to make it fruitful, so I spend more time giving them that intellectual ammo through reading, vocabulary, answering questions in written format, emphasizing proper grammar when speaking, and all of the other things that produced writers like Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston and William Faulkner, but for which the modern educator appears to have little use (since I’m onto great American authors and have a penchant for non-linear consciousness I’ll add Cormac McCarthy here; wow, what a writer!)

As it relates to discipline, I recommend a week or two of silent work in the front of the year, to develop those habits and thought processes which will have plenty of time to manifest themselves through other channels on the back end.

Give your students from time to time, or much of the time, the gift of a silent classroom to give them a chance to achieve high levels of independent concentration.  This prolonged concentration in a quiet environment is what really allows intelligence to get to the next level.

If you agree that the opposite of happiness is not unhappiness, but boredom, and extreme boredom could be construed as a kind of torture, and you witness the extreme boredom in classes where students are unable to do the work set before them, and you realize they can’t do that work because they’ve been passed onto that level without the requisite skills (not because teachers don’t know how to teach, the current politically-correct explanation du jour), and you realize they have been passed on to that level without the requisite skill by those advocating social promotion, then those advocating social promotion should be tried for torture.

I’m half kidding.  Many evils are invisible when not a popular topic, and this is one of them.  Millions of students daily are being bored to intellectual death.  I’ll get to the teachers being also being bored by students who can’t do the work, then suffering the ignominy of being told it’s because they’re not delivering the material properly (see, I can use big words, I just kind of like long, borderline run-on sentences as a stylistic choice). I’ve written in my book Classroom Discipline 101 about the concept of FLOW (which I cite from the excellent book of the same name by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom I don’t quote often because I haven’t learned to spell his name) where we humans are in our maximum state of mind when doing a meaningful task that is neither too easy (which leads to frustration and boredom), or too difficult (which leads to frustration and boredom).

These students don’t benefit from social promotion; those who benefit from social promotion are politicians and administrators who can then cover up the fact that mounds of students in their school districts cannot do appropriate grade-level work.

The original theory behind social promotion, allegedly, is that students will catch up if they are influenced by their peers, and that it hurts their self-esteem to be held behind.  Well, those are pretty stupid reasons actually.  Sure, at times the weak link on a team can be brought up by those stronger around, but not wholesale–in other words, if most people on the team are a weak link, in other words, if not all but one or two students in a class are competent to do the work, the idea that the weaker ones will be pulled along is ludicrous.

So you get, say, a student who is at 5th grade level in math doing High School Algebra.  If you think that is a ridiculous example, you’ve never been in the Los Angeles Unified School District.  It happens there all the time and no one will dare accuse me of lying.  Oh, you will get all sorts of clouded explanations about how they are only 5th Grade Level in certain ways, that developmentally blah blah ad nauseum.  I had to take an inservice where an educator made just such a claim.  I told him if a 5th Grader can do 10th Grade level English, then we can skip levels 6 through 9 and solve the California budget crisis.  Note these educators do not have to prove what they say, they get paid by taxpayers anyway.  In short:  one definition of insanity is saying the insane is possible.  You can make A = Not A.

Now, I know empirically what really hurts self-esteem.  It is not having the wherewithal to do the work before you.  I have seen 16 year olds happily doing work in long division without thought of whether is was beneath them or not–why?  Because it was challenging to them and they were up for the challenge.

An analogy:  Put me on the tennis court with Roger Federer because I’ve been playing as long as him and should be at his level.  I guarantee my self-esteem will not go up as each ball whizzes by me unhit.  Maybe I get lucky on one and it goes back over the net, at which point a millions educators jump up and down with that ‘proof’ that I can do it.

Or put me on the court with a dozen people my age who have no skills at all, do not know how to hold the racket.  I won’t pull them up, I’ll get bored and they’ll keep me from progressing at all.

If you’ve read my book, you’ll know that my philosophy mainly comes from empirical data–what I’ve actually seen happening and what does and doesn’t work, not just blind theorizing.  So what I’m saying here about social promotion is first hand observation as well as logic.  Make sure those who disagree are accountable for their opinions and can show other results.

What this means in the classroom, is you must have work that students can do without being bored, not too difficult or too easy, for your offense to be in place discipline-wise.  My observation is that what bores students is not boring teachers so much as inability to do what is before them. Those at the level of math to send up rocket ships did not get there by having clowns and puppets dance up and down to get across concepts, but by the fascination of the subject itself, and the competence to always go to the next level.  Ah hah, there it is-you should always go to the next level, age independent, not try to skip levels and play make pretend.  Going against reality always hurts in the long run, and in this case we’re losing legions of students to this invisible classroom torture.

I know this puts teachers in a dilemma because I’ve been there:  ”Do I teach the level-appropriate work, or work the students can do?”  I’ll discuss this dilemma later.

Okay, MPT’s, I call’em as I see ‘em.  Go have fun!